my employee complained about me to HR

A reader writes:

I supervise two employees, Charlie and Lucy, and share a third, Linus.

Lucy has strong weeks and weaker weeks, overall fine, but needs regular reminders and is far from perfect.

Charlie is new but a really solid employee. He has been having some personal issues that were affecting some of his reliability at work — coming in late and falling asleep. (He would stay late to compensate, and I have zero concerns with the quality of his work.) He and I have met about it a couple of times and we had discussed some possible aids and solutions. Overall, I believed it would be a fairly temporary issue, so I had given him some slack.

HR was aware of it, and I had expressed to Lucy and Linus that I was aware of the issues and working with Charlie. (They had observed the issues, so I felt it was necessary to say something.)

While I was on vacation, Lucy went to HR and expressed that she didn’t feel I was dealing with it, which led to HR pushing me to issue more formal discipline. Their perspective is then we would have a paper trail that we are addressing it. (HR didn’t tell me it was Lucy who complained, though I suspected it, but later Linus mentioned it to me and said that he didn’t feel it was necessary, since he was aware that I had been working on it.)

Honestly, I’m annoyed. One, that Lucy did this while I was on vacation and didn’t bring it to me. Two, Lucy has had issues I have handled in the same way and I’ve not pushed the discipline, feeling like her overall performance was sufficient to give her leeway. For example, we have a real early start time, and she has been late her fair share early on.

Should I be annoyed? Is it appropriate for me to speak with Lucy? Should I have been more formal earlier like HR wanted?

It’s hard to say without more info.

It’s possible that Lucy is right to think that you haven’t been doing enough — that the issues with Charlies are significant enough that they do need to be addressed more seriously, and it’s possible that the impact on her was worse while you were gone (or even that Charlie got worse while you weren’t there to see it). If the issues with Charlie affect Lucy directly — like if her workload goes up because he’s late, or if she needs him to handle something but he’s asleep (!) — she’s right to be aggravated. And if it’s been happening enough that her frustration is boiling over and you weren’t there to deal with it, she’s not wrong to have gone over your head to try to get it handled.

On the other hand, if the issues with Charlie don’t affect Lucy’s work or the team’s effectiveness in general, then I’d be more inclined to think she overstepped.

Ultimately it comes down to how much her work or the team’s work is being impacted, and potentially the specifics of what was going on with Charlie while you were out.

Either way, though, you shouldn’t chastise her for going to HR — your team needs to be free to do that when they have a concern about how you’re managing them, and that means being okay with that occasionally happening even when you don’t think it was warranted. But you can certainly ask her about what happened while you were out, and it’s fair to point out to her that you’re giving Charlie the same sort of grace you’ve given her in the past.

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