Hello,

My query is w.r.t. certain `problematic' employees. Request all to take it in the correct spirit as I am not at all advising victimisation etc.

There are many people who suffer from some mental/psychological disability. This disability may not even manifest itself at all times - indeed it may be dormant and may get triggered off due to some incident as happens in the case of people with split personalities/obsessive compulsive disorder/Paranoid schizophrenia etc.etc.

This is not normally discovered at the interview stage and may start eating into the company's time at a later stage as the superiors may need to spend more time on these people. These `patients' (for want of a better word) may not get along with peers/subordinates, they disobey, spend time repeating the same action (e.g. some develop this habit of washing their hands every time they touch a new set of paper -so imagine how much time this employee will be spending in the washroom).

The sum and substance is how does HR deal with such employees - do we support them and help them get out of this problem or do we see that they are chucked out in some manner (what happens if they are unionised and this dismissal is not easy). There have been cases where fellow employees in the same dept.get highly frustrated due to such an individual as (s)he can make life hell for others. Mind you the `patient' is well meaning and even disobedience on his / her part is manifested only when the attack is triggered - worse still (s)he doesn't even accept there is a problem as when the attack is triggered the concerned person is in a different mind frame and probably forgets his/her misdemeanours if any after coming back to normal.

Of course there may be some cases where these underlying idiosyncrasies constantly keep manifesting themselves at all times.

Worse still is if the person develops this problem along the way and especially after (s)he has started taking important functions and probably heads a dept.

Advising Medical guidance / help is not so easy to sell to these people as they rarely believe they have a problem in the first place as mentioned above and also our society looks askance at anyone visiting a shrink.

Thanks,

Priyanka