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This question is not directly about myself, but more on a colleague. We are a small IT company (around 20 people) producing&developing software for a niche industry. Mostly we are developers who do all the developing stuff.

But if a customer has problems he can call at our hotline and ask for help. There are two guys guarding the hotline. Lets call them Bob and Roger.

Their job is to answer phone calls, prepare and conduct training for and at customers, test the software etc. Both were hired with the expectation of being able to program.

Now its the case, Bob is a nice guy who does much overtime, is on time every morning, focuses on details, writes nice and good bug reports, but he is not slow. However, Roger often is tardy, has nothing to do with IT or development. Generally, he just waits the whole day for phone calls which stay absent not too rarely. His bug reports usually contain only screenshot of an error code or -message sent by email. When he arrives at the morning his most important task is to choose the meal for this day which takes around 1 hour (we mostly order from some delivery service), another half an hour is taken by blocking the toilet. His lunch breaks are often prolonged. And worst of all, Bob has to take responsibilities for its phone clients from time to time due to his lack of punctuality. All employers have to track their working times in a time controlling system. It happened more than once that Roger did not fill a whole week, but a week later he added his working times to the previous week in a way they are reasonable, but were just simply wrong (Example: On Tuesday he "worked" from 10 to 15 o'clock, but its supplement said he worked from 9.30 to 18.00.). Long Story Short: In my/our Eyes Roger is not at the right place and makes the work environment toxic for us.

Due to these facts Bob does not like Roger (he does not even know that!), and nearly everybody in the office knows that. Except our boss.

The actual question is: How do you deal with such a person?

If one of us goes to the boss and tells him "Hey boss, Roger does not really work" its denunciation and casts a damning light on himself. If we do not do anything we are demotivated further due to this unfairness.

Joe Strazzere
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Skym0sh0
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    I don't have enough rep to VTC but http://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/23165/what-can-i-do-to-make-a-coworkers-lack-of-effort-more-visible – Peter M Sep 25 '16 at 13:40
  • Related: http://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/18018/how-to-handle-being-assigned-a-colleagues-work-when-the-colleague-does-not-comp/18019#18019 and http://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/11246/dealing-with-co-workers-intentionally-working-slower-to-milk-their-work-hours/11254#11254 –  Sep 25 '16 at 14:35
  • @PeterM you can flag as a duplicate, which then puts it into the review queue for high rep users. – Philip Kendall Sep 25 '16 at 14:35
  • @PhilipKendall I keep thinking of flagging as being for inappropriate questions/replies rather than dupes. It's a semantics thing plus me having a lot of rep on other SO sites where I can VTC so I overlooked using it as a VTC mechanism here. – Peter M Sep 25 '16 at 14:58
  • @keshlam keep in mind you can help by [edit]ing the question yourself. Sometimes the best way to learn that sort of thing is having someone do that sort of thing. – enderland Sep 26 '16 at 16:39
  • I'm aware, @enderland. I've done that at times. But it was a point worth making to the OP; if you want to hold people to a high standard, that has to start with yourself. – keshlam Sep 26 '16 at 18:02
  • @keshlam Yes, thank you. Someone corrected my text and I incorporated those corrections, but I am no native speaker and its quite hard for me, unfortunately. But I am trying to get better. – Skym0sh0 Sep 26 '16 at 19:08
  • "If one of us goes to the boss and tells him "Hey boss, Roger does not really work" its denunciation and casts a damning light on himself." - How so? I am not sure I agree with this. Counting on boss's insightfulness may be a long game with uncertain outcome. If you want to wait, then wait. If you want to resolve the situation, then be proactive. I suggest you have a one-on-one with the boss, express your opinion, support it with evidence (e.g. time to resolve Roger's ticket = 2x time to resolve Bob's ticket, and any other quantifiable evidence that you can find). The boss needs "ammo" to act. – A.S Sep 26 '16 at 19:27
  • @Aymor Could you please explain further? In my feeling it is a bad idea to "denunciate", but I agree with you, the boss needs "ammo". And what if the boss blindly trusts its employers? – Skym0sh0 Sep 27 '16 at 09:14
  • @Skym0sh0, Hi - I would not label the act of reporting on a colleague's under-performance as "denunciation." When criticism is justified and necessary in order to correct an issue, it is constructive, not destructive. By providing evidence about the impact of negative performance, you point out factual cause-effect links between behavior and work outcome, rather than subjective opinion. This adds value to the criticism. If the manager cares about team climate, s/he would likely pay attention and follow up with action. If not, they might ignore the comment - but it would be their decision. – A.S Sep 27 '16 at 13:32
  • @Aymor And what if performance is hard or even not to measure? Or how to deal with the lack of punctuality? Report (only) that to the boss? – Skym0sh0 Sep 27 '16 at 15:07
  • @Skym0sh0, the first step is to document specific behaviors that impact performance. You can document things like hours the employee arrives at/leaves work, say for 2 weeks (representative sample). You can save several examples of his tickets, along with examples of tickets by Bob, to show contrast in amount of detail and average time to resolve comparison between Bob and Roger. You can document # of phone calls that had to be picked up by others when he was away from his desk during regular work hours. This should provide factual base for your claims of his under-performance. – A.S Sep 27 '16 at 15:44
  • Keep in mind that there is a whole range of steps the boss can take to 'discipline' Roger. Examples: for tardiness/work hours, the boss can meet with him individually to note that he should accurately report his hours worked, and report any out-of-office hours beyond typical lunch break. There is probably a company policy about reporting tardiness/absence, so the boss could remind Roger about it. For ticket detail, the solution could be additional training (maybe Roger simply lacks knowledge/experience with ticket processing?) so he might share examples of 'good' tickets with Roger. etc.... – A.S Sep 27 '16 at 15:47

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I cannot believe this is not a duplicate but I cannot find one.

This is a management problem. If management cannot see what is going on they are not managing. Don't let it demotivate you. It is good that you care but it is not your problem.

Bug report does effect you. That is fair game. And you basically are reporting Roger.

These bug reports we get from Roger lack the detail for us to properly address them. All we get is an error message. We need to know how to reproduce the error message. Compare that to what we get from Bob.

paparazzo
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