I recently had an employee who proposed an idea to me as the owner that I did not like. Employee accepted a management position with another company and wanted to still keep their full time position with me and split responsibilities with their friend (also on the team) and explained why extending my store hours would be beneficial because they could be AM and PM manager. After a 2 sit down conversations about why this will not work and A LOT of unprofessional push back and extremely rude comments from said employee they decided to step down from their management role to sales associate.

Fast forward 2 weeks and another conversation with employee about their lack of positive performance, the employee is now causing a lot of issues. Talking bad about the business to other employees, not doing their job to the fullest as before, creating a toxic environment for everyone else, and making me as the owner of the business feel like I can’t even be involved in the day to day operations of my business. Employee does not do tasks as requested and puts these on to other employees. Will create to do list for the other employees to do but does not do them. Shows up late but edits clock in time to look like they are on time (we have cameras).

Anyway, how would you address this? This would be the 4th conversation with this employee about their performance. Is that worth it? Or should I fire this employee? I do not want one person and their attitude toward my small business to completely destroy everything I’ve built and I currently feel as if that is where we are headed.