One of the greatest challenges facing a manager is how to effectively deal with the people in the workplace who are not doing what you want. It may be a quality issue, productivity issue, safety issue or even a social issue.  Remote management in outsourced environment poses more challenges than a typical workplace.

If you say or do nothing, you are passively approving that particular behavior. Because you have witnessed the event, you have to do something.

There are a number of options open to you as a manager. There are no easy ones. Let’s have a look at the options so that when you are faced with this situation you can choose your course of action. Each situation is totally different so there is no one option that fits all cases.

The first option is to discuss the situation with a person’s immediate supervisor. This means that you are not violating the chain of command and you are placing the responsibility with the supervisor concerned for them to deal with it. You don’t know if this is a repeated incident or if you happened to observe it for the very first time. The immediate supervisor will know the person very well and will also know whether or not this particular behavior has been an issue in the past.

The next option is to ask the person a question such as, “What are the consequences of your doing the job that particular way?” This is the opening of the dialogue between the individual and the manager. By doing this, the objective of the manager is to get the individual to focus on the outcome of their work. This opens up the opportunity for the manager to coach the individual to perform that task differently. The question must be asked, if you are the supervisor in this situation, how would you feel?

A similar approach is the one where the manager asks, “If you were to do this job again what would you do differently?” Again, it is the beginning of the dialogue about the process that the person was carrying out. As a supervisor, would you like your manager to take this approach when they see something which is wrong?

It is very important that the manager and the supervisors talk about these situations prior to it happening. After the event is too late. If I were a supervisor I would like my manager to point out situations where my team members are not performing so that I can deal with it in my way. In fact, I would insist on it because my manager would not know the person particularly well or the history of performance in detail.

Successful coaching people in the workplace depends on sound relationships. It is more likely that the supervisor will have a sound relationship with the person rather than the manager. However, this is not to say that the supervisor cannot ask the manager to contribute to the conversation. Small issues like this have a hugely negative effect on workers, supervisors and managers.