You can’t avoid it.
Some people in your team are going to have personal issues at work, and you’re going to have to deal with it.
When I first started working about twenty-five years ago, I remember the mentality used to be one of mainly telling people:
“Leave your home life at home. This is work.”
And if you go back even further than that (yes, there are even older people than me still working), I’m sure that this attitude was even more pronounced!
These days things have shifted significantly.
Although we don’t want to have to deal with personal issues at work, it’s something that is the reality in many teams and workplaces.
In this post, I’m going to take a look at why the attitude to personal issues has shifted over time, and of course, some steps to help you manage personal issues in your team.
How has the attitude to personal issues at work shifted?
No longer can we be telling people to “get over it”, or “leave your home issues at home” because things have changed.
This challenge is now very common. So why has the situation shifted so much over the years?
Here are a few reasons why I think leaders battle with this issue more than they did in the past.
The outside has come inside
Our outside lives have never been more accessible to us than they are today.
We now have the potential to be interrupted at work by phone calls, text messages and social media notifications that have nothing to do with work.
It’s hard to have a meeting without somebody looking at a notification on their smart watch or phone.
The news even comes in on your computer through the Windows or Mac interface, unless you specifically turn it off.
Work time used to be sacred. If you were at work, you were working.
Now you’re working, but you’re also available for lots of contact from the outside.
That means personal issues at work are going to seep in, and become more common.
Workplace flexibility has increased
After Covid the working world transformed significantly, but it was changing before that, too.
Your people can now probably work from home, or work with more flexibility in start and finish times.
It’s more common to have households with two parents working, which means flexibility is required for school drop-offs and pickups.
I remember it used to be a big deal if I needed to take time off to go to a medical appointment during work hours.
Now, it has become the norm as our flexibility has increased.
This means that your team’s working hours are no longer safeguarded, they’re at the mercy of the commitments that they make outside of the workplace.
It’s difficult to find good people
While the job markets in many countries seems to be quite difficult to navigate, it also appears that it’s hard to find and hire good people.
In some ways, employees are in a position of power here, because they can vote with their feet and go somewhere better if they don’t like where they work.
And if you’ve got a great team member, you want to keep them.
So it stands to reason that we’d like to provide our team with some flexibility and support, even if they’re struggling with personal issues at work.
Otherwise, they’ll go somewhere where they feel more supported.
There is greater awareness of mental health challenges
Physical health used to be the main talking point.
Now the conversation has grown to include mental health and psychosocial hazards in the workplace.
This growing awareness means that it’s no longer acceptable to tell people to “get over it” or “stop worrying about it, you’re meant to be working.”
As such, leaders need to deal with the challenge of personal issues at work more often.
This can be stressful and frustrating, so let’s turn our attention to the next topic:
How leaders can handle personal issues at work more effectively.
Learn More: How Leaders Can Identify Mental Health Issues.
Leaders need to strike the right balance between empathy and productivity.
A leader’s job is not to support their team.
It’s actually to deliver some sort of result.
The result could be some sort of product or service for some customer, whether they be internal or external to the organisation.
It just turns out that if you don’t support your team, your ability to achieve results is compromised. And if you have some really crappy leadership, it’s likely people will jump ship to somewhere better.
Thoughtful leaders are generally pretty good at the support and empathy part. They have a tendency to think of others’ needs and be considerate of them.
So it can be a real challenge to balance the need for empathy, with the need for results.
But it is a necessary balance, because you won’t have a job without delivering results, and you won’t have a team if you don’t support your people.
Now, let’s have a look at some steps you can take to manage personal issues at work, with your team.
Step 1: Find out what’s going on.
This step is fairly obvious, but unless you know what’s happening with your team members, you won’t be able to help them.
Finding out what’s going on has a few parts to it.
First, you need to be available so your team can speak to you. Not all the time, of course. But if you’re in back-to-back meetings all day, every day, then people won’t be able to find you.
Next, you need to make space for interactions where they can open up. One-to-one meetings are usually good for this. If all you talk about is work status updates, people may not feel like you are open to hearing about personal issues. And if you don’t know about them, you can’t help them.
For better one-to-one meetings, have a read of this post: 1 to 1 Meetings: Let’s Make Them Better.
It’s also important to be observant, and take note of behaviour or performance discrepancies – anything that is outside of the norm for each team member. This helps you spot the signs where there may be something impacting them from outside of the workplace.
One point I’d like to stress here is that you don’t necessarily need to find out the gory details of the personal issue.
The main thing to focus on is the impact, and what they might need from you.
For example, somebody caring for a sick child might need greater flexibility in their working hours, but you don’t need to know exactly what illness is involved.
Step 2: Make reasonable accommodations.
My attitude has always been that by default, I choose to believe that my team members want to do a good job.
Because most of the time, people aren’t trying to take advantage of you or make your life hell, they’re just working through some stuff.
So as a result, I recommend trying to make reasonable accommodations for the personal issues they may be experiencing.
This might mean adjusting working hours, working location or even reducing some of the workload temporarily.
Obviously this will depend on the nature of the work. It’s hard to serve customers in a retail store when you work from home, so this one is a judgement call you’ll need to make.
During this step, it is also useful to inform any of your key stakeholders (such as customers, bosses or other colleagues) of the changes, where relevant. They shouldn’t need details of the issue at hand (privacy is important), but they may need to support the accommodations you are trying to make.
In one of my previous roles, a team member had serious health issues that were impacting his ability to do the work, because of various surgeries or medical appointments.
The challenge was that it was a fast-moving project environment, where there were always deadlines to be hit.
A few times in moments of stress, I caught myself wondering whether he was going to be able to do the job, and whether we should push to find someone else (as he was employed as a contractor, rather than a full-time employee).
But I decided to persist, and thankfully he managed to get things under control and do a really good job once he could put many of the health issues behind him.
It can be a hard judgement call to make, but I decided I didn’t want to be the type of person who got rid of someone who was struggling just to hit a few deadlines.
Step 3: Monitor progress.
Obviously, you need to monitor performance and behaviour to see how things are tracking.
If things are getting better, great!
If not, it’s time to follow the next steps.
Step 4: Find out the rules.
If the situation isn’t improving, I find it’s helpful to understand the rules of the game before taking further action.
And this usually means talking to someone in your Human Resources (HR) department, or equivalent.
They’ll hopefully be able to inform you about relevant policies and procedures, and the steps you’d need to take to handle the situation further.
For example, in Australia, there is a “fitness for work” process that can be used to formally assess whether an employee is able to undertake their role.
This is not something a leader should begin without being advised by a qualified person.
Step 5: Discuss the requirements of the role.
It’s never pleasant, but at some point, you’ll need to have a discussion with the person about the requirements of the role, and the difference in performance that you’re observing.
After all, everyone has a job to deliver some sort of result, and this team member is no different.
This would fall into the category of a “difficult conversation”, because an employee struggling with personal issues at work probably doesn’t want to hear about how they aren’t achieving results.
But it is an important step in holding people accountable, even while you’re trying to support them.
The team member needs to see that they are still accountable for their own behaviour and performance.
When you’re tackling this step, consider one important reminder:
If a team member is struggling with personal issues at work and their performance is suffering, this is often having an impact on other members of the team.
It’s important that while you’re being fair to your struggling employee, you’re also being fair to the other team members.
This conversation may result in an adjusted plan, or it may highlight the need for more formal HR processes to either provide the team member with extra support or to assess whether they are able to fulfil the requirements of the role.
A few last things you’ll need…
There are a few last things you’ll need if you’re going to see this through.
And those are patience, consistency and commitment.
Patience, to support someone even if you can’t see things improving quickly.
Consistency, so you undertake a fair and reasonable process.
Commitment, so you hold the person accountable even when it gets challenging.
Dealing with personal issues at work is never easy and sometimes unpleasant.
If you’ve developed good relationships with your people and a supportive work environment where you also hold people accountable, these are a great starting point to working through challenges and coming out better on the other side.
How do you handle personal issues at work, when your team members are dealing with them? Let me and all the thoughtful leaders know in the comments!
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