A brief conversational excerpt where two speakers discuss how employees' personal tragedies (family deaths, relationship changes, children moving away) can cause underperformance at work, and raise the managerial dilemma of how long a struggling business should accommodate such employees before terminating employment.
Many times when an employee starts to underperform, it's actually something in their personal life affecting their performance.
Oh, his mom died. Oh, his brother died. Had kids that moved away and doesn't have his significant other anymore. After every single day, it was like, I love you like a brother, man. It was growing on me because he was. He was an awesome guy.
The question is, when the business is struggling, how long do you put up with that before you have to let them go?
He went away for his daughter's baby shower, and his eye was swollen, his knee was swollen. And I think he got, like, into a fight or something. Couldn't come to work. We just kind of had to take a step back and reevaluate.
