Most organizations don’t keep bad employees because nobody realizes there’s a problem. They keep them because everybody realizes there’s a problem and dealing with it is harder than working around it.

The supervisor knows who isn’t carrying their weight. The coworkers definitely know. Sometimes customers know, and in government the public probably knows. Yet the employee stays there month after month, sometimes year after year, while everybody adjusts around the same problems.

There are good reasons not to fire somebody too quickly. Complaints should be investigated. Expectations should be clear. People should be trained, corrected, and given a fair opportunity to improve. Someone shouldn’t lose a career because a supervisor is frustrated or because one person made an accusation.

I’m talking about what happens after that process has had a fair chance to work.

Sometimes the employee improves. Sometimes they don’t. Once it becomes clear that the same problem is still there, another warning or another counseling session needs to have a purpose beyond postponing what comes next. If I’m writing the same thing for the fifteenth time that I wrote the fifth time, I probably don’t have a documentation problem anymore. I have a decision problem.

Before I make that decision, I still need to look at management. Were the expectations actually clear? Was the employee trained properly? Did supervisors address the problem when it started, or ignore it until everybody was fed up? Are the rules being applied consistently?

I can’t tolerate poor performance for six months and suddenly expect an employee to understand why today became the breaking point. I also can’t tell somebody to improve without being clear about what improvement looks like. The employee owns their behavior. Management owns what it did, or didn’t do, around that behavior.

Once those questions have been answered, keeping the employee has consequences too. Other people start carrying extra work. Supervisors spend more time managing the same problem. Good employees watch somebody beside them miss the standard over and over while they keep meeting it.

That’s when one employee’s problem starts changing the organization around them.

Another version of that developed significantly after COVID. Organizations needed people in positions, and decisions that might not have been made under normal circumstances became easier to justify.

I saw it firsthand when I was a General Manager with Allied Universal. People moved into positions of significant responsibility who wouldn’t have been competitive for those jobs under normal circumstances. Some carried fairly high leadership titles while struggling with basic things like running a meeting, keeping track of follow-up, or clearly communicating what needed to happen next. At that level, those things should’ve been routine.

The emergency passed. The promotion didn’t.

By then, correcting the decision meant admitting the promotion had been a mistake, documenting the failures, dealing with the conflict, and finding somebody else. Leaving the person where they were was easier, so everybody else learned to work around them.

That’s what employees notice. They know who shows up late, who doesn’t finish the work, who creates problems, who gets corrected, and who keeps getting another “last chance.”

An organization can put its values on posters, in handbooks, and across its website. People are still going to judge the standard by what they watch management tolerate. If one person repeatedly fails to meet it and nothing meaningful happens, everybody else eventually gets the message. The written standard may say one thing. The actual standard is what management continues to accept.

That doesn’t mean struggling employees should be pushed out at the first sign of trouble. Good employees can struggle. People improve. Training works sometimes. Coaching works sometimes. A second chance can change the outcome. But a second chance only means something if there can eventually be a last one.

When the expectations were clear, the support was there, the process was fair, and the behavior still doesn’t change, keeping the employee is a decision too. Everybody else has to live with it.