a new employee has gone AWOL

A reader writes:

My husband, Jim, is a managing attorney at a small firm that is entirely remote, with lawyers spread out across the region. He recently hired a mid-level attorney, Fergus, who is based in a different city and who reports directly to him.

Fergus started 10 days ago and to date appears to have done no work. Beginning on day one, he began telling Jim and other senior attorneys that he was having a “temporary personal crisis” and needed more time to finish the assignments he was given. He didn’t specify the nature of this crisis, and no one has felt comfortable probing and they have tried to be accommodating. But now deadlines are approaching and they have no sense of when or if Fergus will be able to turn around his assignments. He appears to have billed zero hours using the firm’s time-keeping system, but every time they have checked in with him, he emphasizes that the crisis is temporary, will be resolved soon, and says he can turn some things in the following day — implying that he’s been working on these matters. But he never turns in anything.

What do you advise they do at this point? It’s a small firm with no real HR and none of the managers have ever dealt with a situation like this before. For what it’s worth, there was one potential red flag during the interview process: Fergus had quit his last job of five years with no other job lined up. He said he quit because he couldn’t stand working there anymore. Jim decided to overlook this because he comes from a similar Big Law environment as Fergus, and he thought Fergus was a good fit for the firm’s needs.

I answer this question — and two others — over at Inc. today, where I’m revisiting letters that have been buried in the archives here from years ago (and sometimes updating/expanding my answers to them). You can read it here.

Other questions I’m answering there today include:

• Is my CEO stringing me along in her succession planning?
• Should I give feedback to an overly enthusiastic and unprofessional intern candidate?

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