4 ways bad employees destroy good companies

If you've recently discovered your team, department, or company is suffering from a few bad eggs, don't panic — you're not alone

According to a 2013 CareerBuilder survey of 6,000 hiring managers and HR professionals, 27% of U.S. employers claimed that a single bad hire cost their business more than $50,000.

This kind of financial burden can be detrimental to businesses, especially as most have more than one bad employee within their company.

However, ineffective and unproductive workers actually cost your company more than it can afford to lose.

Business Insider highlighted four hidden ways that bad employees are affecting your business, and why you have to dismiss them in order to reach your goals.

1.Negative business reputation

Bad employees can be harmful by destroying your company’s good reputation which takes years to establish by perfecting its products, services and professionalism.  Just one bad employee can have a negative effect on all of this hard work as both clients and customers will become dissatisfied. This damage could well be irreversible and may take years to rectify, if you are ever able to do so

2.Lowered employee morale

Top performing employees may become frustrated, dissatisfied and disengaged if they have to pick up slack from unproductive or ineffective workers.  These ‘good eggs’ may even resign if their workloads become unmanageable.  You should make every effort to remove the ‘bad egg’ so that you can focus your efforts on finding a team member willing to share the load and work hard to achieve the vision you have created for your business.

3.Workflow interruptions

Employees who do not take the initiative or have the ability to problem solve for themselves can cause huge disruptions for management. Instead of focussing on the core issues in their department or team, your managers are forced to hand-hold the problematic employee through tasks and be plagued with questions constantly.

This leads to less productive management-level employees, whom you rely on to move your initiatives forward. However, they are now unable to drive or implement these initiatives due to the constant supervision required for bad employees. Although firing an employee that isn’t performing is not a pleasant task, you need to think solely about what is best for the business and the decision will become obvious.

4.Wasted training costs

Another hidden cost associated with bad employees is the wasted resources spent on training and retraining these individuals. It’s likely that the knowledge that the extra training sessions provides will not even be implemented successfully.

These resources could instead be used to train new, effective employees. However, until you get rid of the bad eggs in your organization, you will be unable to provide these resources to the workers that deserve and would benefit most from them.

To sum it up, your bad employees cost your company more than you think. With this in mind, it’s time for you to make the hard choice, get confrontational, and root these bad employees out of your business. Because the truth is, you can’t afford the alternative.

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