I had to tell a staff member today that their performance did not meet the standards we agreed needed to be met when we created a PIP and she literally screamed and ran from the office…

Update for the masses: Thank you to everyone who provided constructive (and not so constructive) criticism. I have learned a LOT in the past 36 hours. And want to clarify that;

1) After I told my boss and the director of student employment that I was going to reject this application, they went ahead and verbally offered her a position before I consulted with HR to get a rejection letter out to her.

2) I have been managing for three years and never had to let someone go. This was a lesson for me and while it rattled me, I am grateful. I have had so many other staff within the institution reach out to me to say that they have dealt with similar situations, offered support and added me to “the hiring and firing” group chat.

3) You all were absolutely right when you called nepotism/raised suspicions about her connections. My team are super sleuths… they started doing some social media stalking in October and have successfully kept it to themselves that our problem team member is the daughter of a family friend of the director of Student Employment.

4) Due to a complaint, an investigation was launched yesterday into not only my handling of this case but also the involvement of my GM and our lovely friend, the director. I have receipts for ALLLLL of it and am happy to let them review every action I have taken with a fine tooth comb.

I was geared up for an extremely difficult and uncomfortable conversation but it became an absolute spectacle instead.

I work on a college campus and the team that I train and hire are all current students (typically upper year) as we have more success engaging students when their peers are facilitating events and programming and acting as the “authority figures”. One hire on my team was someone that I had been iffy on throughout the interview process because she had been late or entirely missed an interview timeslot that she herself selected. I was encouraged to hire her anyway and told that she would “rise to the level of the rest of the team with some encouragement.” I laughed. Then realized they were serious and when pushed, I hired her on a “casual” basis. She is first up for callouts and can pick up shifts, but I don’t put the heavy work on her.

We did intensive training in August and she tried to get out of every training session, workshop, online module, team bonding day, and piece if prepwork we had scheduled. I told my GM who said I needed to wait it out and that she would improve. She missed deadlines consistently. Didn’t check or respond to emails or team chat. Skipped one-on-ones and staff meetings with no notice. Never gave an apology and always had an excuse and the list goes on. I put her on a PIP in October with very achievable goals. She was to facilitate two events (all the planning and preparation were done by myself and other members of the team) and turn in her monthly reflections from Sept/Oct and turn in the next two by deadline.

Well, she cancelled one event 15 minutes before it started because “she didn’t understand the instructions” it was a BINGO photo scavenger hunt. Hand out the BINGO cards, gameplay instructions and QR code for photo database was on the back. She was literally only responsible for handing out the BINGO cards and collets them to hand to me as each team turned theirs in. The second one she decided to change the time and location and didn’t update the social media posts, posters, tell the front desk, literally nothing. Then as myself and the front desk staff and other team member are trying to call her as we were going to assist with facilitating she doesn’t answer her phone for two hours then shows up later complaining we “blew up her phone” and nobody showed up to the event. My other staff member ended up running a giant board game tournament on the fly which was still running when this girl ahowed up so then she was upset that we “ruined her event”. She turned in the Sept/Oct reflections with a sentence or two each because she couldn’t remember what she had done the months prior and never turned in November.

I scheduled a meeting with her last week which she rescheduled four times then no showed so when I met her on Monday, I told her the conversation we would have had last week was very different from this week as I cannot in good faith, continue to employ her and pay her to do work that does not meet even the bare minimum. While I appreciated how well liked she was amongst her peers, the rest of the team worked overtime to pick up the slack and often had to pivot last minute to cover her being late to shift, not completing her admin tasks, and doing checkins on her community of students in addition she to their own. She started crying big crocodile tears so I offered her tissues and asked her if she understood why she was being let go. She kept saying it wasn’t fair and the rest of the team was being mean to her and targeting her to make her look stupid since the middle of November when they ran a board game tournament. The thing is, the rest if the team (5 people) approached me the week after her PIP was put in place to express their concerns about her deliberately pitting team members against one another and they had receipts. Receipts on receipts in fact. Enough that I brought it to HR who directed me to stick with the PIP as it was already in place and would terminate her contract at the end of the semester anyways if she didn’t meet the clauses she agreed to in the PIP anyways.

When I asked for examples and stated that this would escalate to HR but was unlikely to change the outcome of her employment she told me she knew that I was a “…vindictive b!and a c-u-next-tuesday. You always hated me didn’t you!” I am ridiculously nice to my team because when I was a student staff member I had a nightmare manager. No matter how disrespectful she was or dismissive she got, I would calmly state what needed to happen, what went wrong, and good thing in the situation and constructive feedback and advice to improve in the future. She apparently took that as me being petty and pointing out “small failures” this whole time. As her manager it is my job to do this. I have her all of the contact info for HR, offered to set up an exit interview for her with my GM who would be most unbiased in this situation and reminded her that the PIP was absolute and that she had signed this contract which I took over an hour explaining to her, so her position would unfortunately be terminated as discussed.

She looked me dead in the eye, stopped crying for a second, inhaled the biggest lungful of air she could manage and screamed at the top of her lungs before running out of my office and proceeding to scream and sob randomly as she was running about. I let the rest of the office staff know not to engage. Notified campus security and called up the counseling department to see if they had any openings as I may send someone their way. They gave me the direct line of the staff member that is available for emergency appointments in case I am able to get her over there. I called up HR to update them and documented everything.

I am just exhausted after dealing with her antics and I don’t know what to say to the rest of the team anymore because while none of them witnessed anything they have been getting messages, texts and snaps asking wtf happened earlier today. The clean answer is “it’s private, I can’t share that information with you.” But given that one of them is rooming with her I think at least she deserves to know. The problem is with such a small team, if one person knows something, so does everyone else. It’s a nightmare…