RE: Advice, please

["Jennifer Westerberg" <jen -at- kurant -dot- com>]

I've been in this situation before (problem employees at other sites), and
its really not pleasant. On the plus side, it sounds like you've got good
management support.  On the negative side, you're going to be the one doing
the dirty work.  And dirty it is.  The key is giving her warnings, and
documenting the whole thing.  And if you need to, notify HR as to what
you're up to asap. Oh, and keep your manager fully in the loop.

You might want to start by emailing her drafts back to her and say something
like "I noticed that the drafts you sent me had the following oddities: the
procedures don't reflect the new product, the images are floating instead of
inline (we had discussed that all images should be inline at our last
meeting), etc, etc.  Could you please submit corrected drafts by (specify
date here)"  Be as pleasant as possible, but firm.  There's a possibility
that she has never been given standards for what a first draft should look
like (seriously, maybe she thinks she's just supposed to do a search and
replace on the app name and be done with it), so you might also want to
review what your standards are for a first draft.

If that doesn't work, you may want to see if you can fly out and do a face
to face.  You could start the conversation by saying something like "I
understand you have a great deal of experience, and I really want to
leverage that, but the drafts you're sending me aren't what I was
expecting".  And then go into a specific list of issues.

If after this, you still don't see results, then yea, its time to do the
dirty work of letting her go. For what its worth, most times that I've
started this process, the person has left the job before I had to fire them.
But trust me - as hard as it is, the process of firing someone is much
easier than the problem of constantly having to cover or clean up after
someone.

Best of luck!



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