My employee overdoes everything, and it’s costing money

A reader asks:

I run a small business that supplies a product to major companies. To keep the details anonymous, let’s say that we supply garments to a few mid-tier clothing retailers that you can buy in the mall. The problem is that one of my employees two levels down (he reports to someone who reports to me), Dave, behaves as though we’re making clothing for Gucci or Prada. This causes enormous production headaches. It means everything moves much more slowly through his department, because he is extremely conscientious about quality.

That is admirable, but it results in things like being short with our subcontractors because they have not produced the products to his standard, even though they have produced them to industry standards. We’ve lost freelance designers because they’re being asked to make Prada-level clothing for Old Navy-type wages. He also causes many things to be done over or redoes them himself. This dramatically drives up the cost of what we produce. He should be producing 5,000 items a year in order to justify his salary but he only produces 3,000. This means we have gotten to a point where it actually costs us more to produce these products than we are being paid for them.

Both his manager and I have attempted to tell him directly that he is overdoing things. This angers him and causes him to dig in his heels. We’ve said, “You don’t have to redo this work. It was fine the way the freelancers produced it. Just concentrate on the big issues like the overall cut of the fabric.” What he apparently hears is, “What you do doesn’t matter. You’re wrong to be concerned about quality.” His reaction is to stay up all night and work through the weekend to try and increase his numbers instead of just not doing everything twice.

Dave’s heart is in the right place. This is tricky because it’s not like we’re asking him to do X and he refuses. We’re asking him to do X, and he does X twice and then adds Y and Z! How can I motivate Dave to take a step back and be more in alignment with the market tier we serve instead of driving up cost and increasing everyone’s aggravation by overdoing things? Or perhaps he is just a bad fit for this job?

Green responds:

He might be a bad fit for the job. Whether his heart is in the right place or not, you can’t keep someone on who refuses to work in the way that you need, wildly misses your production metrics, and drives up your costs—and who, when spoken to about it, flatly refuses to change what he’s doing.

But first make sure you have been very, very clear with Dave. Not just “Concentrate on X, not Y” clear. This needs to be, “If you do not immediately start doing X and stop doing Y, we are going to need to let you go” clear.

You need to say it that way to make sure Dave understands the stakes. It’s possible that he has been hearing, “We would like to have the level of care and quality that you’re providing and obviously it would be better if we could, but sadly we cannot find a way to sustain it.” And he’s thinking, “Let me show you how we can do it!”

So you need to be crystal clear that you don’t want it and will not allow it. You also need to be clear about the consequences if he continues—that you will fire him. If you don’t spell that out explicitly and then you let Dave go, he sounds like he might be shocked because he’s focused on how much he cares and how hard he’s working (and in his mind, who would fire someone who cares so much and works so hard?). So it’s a kindness to let him know now that that’s the path he’s heading down.

If you have this conversation and the problem continues, then you’ll know that he just can’t do the job you need done. At that point, you can move forward with a clear conscience because you’ll have told him clearly what he needed to do to stay in the job and will have given him a chance to do it.

Want to submit a question of your own? Send it to alison@askamanager.org.

—Alison Green

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