Employee’s Adult Child Constantly Interrupts Them At Work

A reader writes:

I have a barely competent employee, Lee, whose low productivity has been further harmed in the past year by the constant disruptions caused by their adult child, and I do not know what to do about it.

Some background: while Lee is a hard worker, they are not very coachable and do just enough to avoid being fired. Because they are a single parent, when their child was school-aged there was always an attendance problem because when their child was ill (which was constant) or had an appointment, etc. they were the only person who could handle it. They exceeded their earned time off every year and had time donated by other employees (which we permit).

Fast forward to present day. Lee’s child, who has autism, graduated from high school about a year and a half ago and is finding the transition to adulthood very difficult. Lee currently has FMLA approved to support their child as they try to get what I expect will be a serious mental health diagnosis because there have been many emotional outbursts, stealing, calling the police, etc. — all at night and on weekends. This has often led to Lee missing work or coming to work extremely tired, stressed, and distracted (because of course it has, it’s a terrible situation!). They are very close to once again exhausting all of their paid time off (but can take unpaid time and again, they have FMLA). We have offered every possible resource — unpaid leave, our EAP, flexible scheduling, schedule adjustments, deadline extensions, etc. It is a hard situation and we are not jerks.

That said, it has now been years of Lee barely being competent at their job, and we have a business to run and need someone in this role who can do the job. When their child was a kid, we made allowances, but now it seems there may be no end in sight. Their child calls and texts them constantly throughout the day, multiple times per hour. When they were in school, it was kept in check by the school day schedule, but now there are no guardrails.

They had a dispute in the parking lot during the workday once. During a serious weather emergency during the workday, when Lee needed to be helping to manage the emergency, their child was calling them panicking, saying they were driving to our workplace because they were afraid to be alone, and it upset everyone. Their child endangered themself, their parent (our employee), and other employees who went outside in a weather emergency to try to intercept them.

Over the years, I have managed many people who had immediate family members of all ages with serious mental or physical health problems of all kinds, and none of them ever caused this much distraction and disruption to the workplace. We don’t want to sound like heartless, uncaring assholes, but we need Lee to create and enforce boundaries with their adult child to stop causing so much disruption to them at work, and I have no idea how to handle it.

How clear have you been with Lee about what you need from them and the gap between that and their ongoing performance?

It’s possible that by being so accommodating with Lee, you’ve inadvertently let them think that the status quo is okay — after all, it’s been going on for years! You’re thinking, “It’s been years of this now and there’s no end in sight, so something needs to change.” But Lee might be figuring that since you’ve allowed it for years, it’s not a huge problem and it’s okay to continue on like this.

If it’s really just that now that Lee’s kid isn’t in school, there’s no limit to the number of interruptions, you can address that head-on: “I know you’re in a tough situation with Sam and we’ve tried to be as accommodating as we can, but the number of times Sam calls and texts you during the day has become disruptive. We need you to be focused on your work while you’re here. The occasional interruption is of course fine, but it can’t be multiple times per day.”

But it sounds like it’s not just the increase in interruptions during the day; it sounds like it’s the entire situation — the unreliability, the missed deadlines, the overall distraction, and frankly Lee’s work quality too. Given that, the best thing to do is to be up-front that this was never sustainable, but you’d mistakenly believed it would be limited in duration and you can’t continue to accommodate it. You can say, “We’re now at the point where we need you here and focused, without missing deadlines or making mistakes or having such frequent interruptions. We of course will honor your FMLA, but I want to be transparent with you that the role requires XYZ and right now we’re not seeing that.” Depending on how Lee responds to that, there might be a point in the conversation where it makes sense to ask if, knowing that the job requires XYZ, that’s something they’re able to commit to. (The realistic answer is almost certainly no, but there could be value in framing the question that way.)

Also, you’ve been very kind to let this go on for so long with someone who you describe as “barely competent,” not very coachable, and doing “just enough to avoid being fired,” but it almost certainly didn’t make sense to do that. It’s one thing to bend over backwards for a great employee, but that’s not this situation. And while I completely understand not wanting to be unfeeling to someone in a hard situation, it’s not a jerk move to have standards about what you need from someone you are paying to do a job, particularly over the course of years. (You might also look at what the impact of accommodating Lee to this extent, when they’re not even good at their job, has been on their coworkers, who are probably absorbing a lot of the slack. You have obligations to them, too.) So even leaving aside the issues caused by Lee’s family situation, you’d still need to have a conversation along the lines of, “The company has evolved and at this point we really need someone in this job who can do XYZ.”

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