my employee comes to work smelling like weed

A reader writes:

Recreational marijuana is legal in my state, but I don’t necessarily want my independent retail store to smell of it, given that we want to give our customers a pleasant shopping experience. I myself get migraines and other adverse health effects from the strong smell of it and cigarette smoke, not to mention that I’m asthmatic, but I don’t want to police my employees in their free time.

However, my employee has started to arrive at work reeking of it. Their belongings and their personal space radiate the smell by at least 10-20 feet, so between them being at the front and their belongings in the back, half the store smells of it.

I am very new at managing people and this is a new one for me. I haven’t even had to ask cigarette-smoking employees not to show up smelling of cigarettes, and this, while legal, is not what I want my cozy little store smelling like!

We do light a candle every day for ambiance, but now it smells like we’re trying to cover up the pot smell instead. Which is even more headache-inducing.

Due to other performance issues for this employee and another, I’m seriously considering a restructuring of our team anyway, but if I decide to keep this employee for what they do well, I need to figure out how to address this and other behaviors (like they have started bringing their partner to work, who then sits in one of our only two chairs for the public that entire shift, which then means that there’s only one other chair for whoever might be sitting to wait for a shopping family member).

This is weird behavior that was not happening when this employee first started this job, and I know I need to address it, but it’s also our crunch time and given that I’ve had to cover for an employee who’s called out sick 17 days since June (the other reorg I’m considering), I’m honestly too exhausted right now to find words to address it.

Do you have a suggestion for me? We don’t yet have an employee handbook — this is a very new, very small retail store — so maybe that’s where I start?

Nope, you start with a direct conversation!

If you decide at some point that it would be helpful to have an employee handbook, you can certainly include things like this in it … but a handbook isn’t the way to address this because it’s happening right now and you can just have a conversation about it. (What’s more, having a policy in the handbook in no way guarantees people won’t violate it. You’re going to end up having these conversations regardless.)

The basic formula you want (and you’re going to need this formula a lot as a manager) is:
* X is happening/not happening.
* I need Y to happen instead.
* Can you do that going forward? (or some conversational version of this)

So in this case, you might say: “You probably don’t realize this, but your clothes and your backpack both smell strongly like marijuana. I don’t want the store to smell like it, and it gives me and probably some customers migraines, so — while you can of course do whatever you want in your off hours — I need you to figure out a way to not bring the smell into the store.”

That might be all you need to say! But if they seem confused about how to comply with that (which they might, since often smokers are nose-blind to the smell and don’t realize it’s traveling with them), feel free to make suggestions. Maybe they need to use a bag for work that’s not stored in the same area they smoke in, or even bring a clean outfit to change into when they arrive. Or maybe they’re smoking somewhere very unventilated (like a car) and that’s causing the smell to cling to them. Ultimately, though, it’s on them to figure out a way to solve it, although you can make suggestions if you have them.

And if they don’t solve it, it’s reasonable for you to decide you can’t keep them on. Ideally you’d give them a warning about that first — something like, “The smell we talked about is still an issue. I do need you to solve it pretty quickly in order to stay in the job” — but you shouldn’t let this drag on for months. 

You should be similarly direct about them bringing their partner to work! That one is even easier, because there’s nothing for them to “solve” — the solution is straightforward. So: “Jane, Peter can’t continue to come to work with you and stay here during your shift. He’s using one of our only two chairs for customers, and we don’t let non-employees stay here for the day.”

And in a similar vein, here’s some advice on the employee taking too much time off (1, 2, 3).

You are falling into a very, very common new manager trap, where you want people to do things differently but aren’t comfortable telling them that clearly, so you’re over-complicating it in your head (like wondering if you can solve it through a handbook). The most fundamental part of your job as a manager is to clearly communicate what you do and don’t want people doing, and the more comfortable you can get doing that — and the more you can see your authority as just a tool to get things done and something you exercise matter-of-factly in order to get the outcomes the business needs — the more effective you will be (and the happier good people will be working for you because they’ll know where they stand and won’t have to try to read your mind, and also because they’ll see problems getting dealt with forthrightly and without drama).

Some columns that may help:

advice for new managers

how can I stop softening the message in tough conversations with my staff?

how I can be more authoritative now that I’m a manager?

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