Advice on telling staff to smarten up?

Tiddlywinks

Does the company have a dress code? If so, use that as a prop for any discussion you have.

I favour the team approach to be honest - if you hold regular meetings then you could choose to "revisit" codes of practice for chosen subjects over a series of meetings.

Similarly, you could send a reminder email to the team and then follow up with the individual if no improvement is seen.

Tygermoth

The team meeting approach does not work.

We had a bloke with nasty BO, with a side of smelly feet and he was utterly oblivious. (ugh it was just foul)

So cue us being dragged into meeting after meeting about personal hygiene... and it just went over his head. Four meetings later and the penny still had not dropped.

I think the Team Manager was dodging having to bring up the issue and her avoidance paid off when after the fifth meeting Mr Smellyfeet muttered to a co-worker as everyone filed out “another waste of time about an issue that was nothing to do with me”.... when the person he was whining to turned to him and incredulously said "you dumb s**t it’s you who stinks, for f**k sake have a bath"

That did finally solve the problem.


The meeting the week after was about sensitivity and understanding in the workplace though

Sambucus_Nigra

Tiddlywinks wrote: »

Does the company have a dress code? If so, use that as a prop for any discussion you have.

I favour the team approach to be honest - if you hold regular meetings then you could choose to "revisit" codes of practice for chosen subjects over a series of meetings.

Similarly, you could send a reminder email to the team and then follow up with the individual if no improvement is seen.

That's a very longwinded and bad practice; spend hours and hours revisiting things when one conversation or two with the person involved would do. Everyone will know who it's aimed at; and I detest managers who send out 'some people' messages when it's their job to manage those people, so if it's an issue, deal with it.

Ronaldo_Mconaldo

What you could do is advise staff to read a certain post on a certain forum, just put it under AOB at the end of the meeting. They might get the hint.

heretolearn_2

I've had this problem with two members of staff and the only thing to do is tackle it directly. Both times it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be - one was well aware that their standards had slipped, knew what I was going to say as soon as I started talking, apologised, and sorted themselves out.

I did ask if there were any health issues that might be effecting this, but was told no.

For the other one it was a new member of staff who worked on reception so I did a 'pre-probation end review' with them, where I 'marked' her on various aspects of her performance and we discussed them. (There were other problems as well). When we got to her mark for 'Appearance' and it was low, she initially was quite cross and said we can't judge people on that, she can't help how she looked etc etc but I explained this is not a 'how pretty are you' criteria, it is on how are you presenting yourself. Are your clothes appropriate, clean and tidy, is your personal hygiene acceptable? The main problem she had was very dirty greasy unkempt hair. She then brought this up herself and asked if that was the problem, yes I said, she then explained that due to some health problem she found it difficult to wash her hair herself. I then suggested she look at using a dry brush-in shampoo (which she hadn't heard of) and that she had to brush/comb when it needed. Problem solved.

getmore4less

IME it is often the single people that tend to have the problems especialy if they are not looking. no one to give them hints at home

We once had a service engineer that lacked the basics.
Nice enough guy and got on well with people but just did not get on top of the situation so some weeks would get a bit rank especialy if it was warm and physical stuff needed doing

This was raised by someone in a closed environment(only 3 people) fixing some computers asking if they washed, "Bath 3 times a week came the reply from the engineer", you do change the water was the response.

Things improved.

The problem for some singles that have now left home is they don't know how to wash clothes to avoid them smelling especialy if they don't use Anti persperant, no amount of showereing/baths will help if you have smelly clothes, they will smell allright when you put them but once warmed up the smell comes back.

Savvy_Sue

The OP didn't actually mention BO, but while we're discussing laundry habits ...

with the one I had, the person was making a big effort with that but the problem remained. Then a colleague said "it's a really sickly sweet smell, like too much cheap detergent or fabric conditioner".

Now, there may be nothing wrong with 'cheap' itself, but once this person changed their laundry products and I think started getting things out of their wardrobe the night before they intended to wear them, things were a LOT better!