3 Steps for Protecting Your Company From ‘Toxic’ Employees
By Andrew Potts, Marketing –

Problem employees should be dealt with quickly before they have a chance to make the workplace a toxic experience.
Toxic employees — every manager has had one. It’s the person who can’t get along with anyone, who brings their personal problems (and mood swings) to the office, and who ruins companies’ reputations through poor customer service. Such problematic employees are an enormous burden to businesses, and so great measures are taken by companies to avoid hiring one.
Despite hiring managers’ best efforts, however, these employees often manage to pose as valuable assets to the company during the interview process. Once the lengthy hiring and training process is complete, managers discover, all too late, that they’ve hired a toxic employee. Here are three steps companies can take to mitigate the negative influence of these employees:
1) Take the time to regularly identify toxic employees. Consult with managers and supervisors to determine which employees bring everyone down. If managers are afraid to point out the toxic employees because they’re intimidated, replace them with managers who aren’t afraid of standing up for company policies. Regularly monitor the staff, management included, to ensure employees are keeping in line with ethical behavior and appropriate behavior.
2) Set behavior guidelines. Once you’ve determined which employees are causing problems, it’s time to set the guidelines for appropriate behavior. Officially declare to the whole company, and to individual employees as necessary, which behaviors will no longer be tolerated. Set specific consequences for particular behaviors, publicize them clearly and often to the staff, and, most importantly, follow through on these consequences. If consequences are never carried out, employees will lose respect for the rules and forego making the effort to abide by them. Once the first employee is terminated or appropriately reprimanded, the other employees will receive the message and recognize that if they do not fall in line, they too will suffer the consequences.
3) Obtain employment practices liability insurance. If you’re going to be firing an increasing number of people, there’s a good chance one of them will try to sue for wrongful termination. This relatively inexpensive insurance protects the company from what could potentially be a costly lawsuit.
A New, Innovative Solution
Of course, all of this hassle could be avoided if companies took one extra step in the hiring process: submitting the potential candidates to EyeDetect®. This lie detection technology is the latest alternative to the polygraph and is designed to help employers choose the right candidates for the job. With 85 percent accuracy, EyeDetect can determine in as little as 40 minutes whether a person has previously engaged in any illegal or shady dealings. By implementing these screenings, employers can spend less time worrying about the candidates they’re hiring and more time on building and expanding their business.