Dilemma in the workplace
Henry was a young Associate Consultant working for a Multinational Corporation. Six months after joining the company, he was assigned to take charge of a consulting project. As it was his first major assignment, Henry was determined to perform well.
As a large part of the project involves conducting customer phone interview, Henry hired 4 temporary staffs for the task. He trained each of them for 1 week before getting them to start on the phone interviews. There was a tight deadline to meet as the 1000 interviews had to be completed in 1 month.
Things were going smoothly at first. The temporary staffs were efficient and the quality of their interviews were mostly decent. However, with 2 weeks left before the deadline, Henry realized that the quality of interviews done by the temporary staffs were getting unacceptable. Many questions were not completed and the number of interviews done per day were also much less than the targeted number.
He called them to his office, with the intention to give them a warning on their poor work performance the past few days. Much to his surprise, the attitude of the 4 temporary staffs were indifferent despite Henry's emphasis on the importance of the project.
Finally Henry finally realized the root cause of the problem. The 4 temporary staffs knew that with 2 weeks left before the deadline, Henry would not have time to sack them, hire new staffs and train them again. At the same time, they were not concerned as to whether the project could be completed on time. They seemed to be the one with a larger bargaining power. One of the temporary staffs Mike even argued with Henry that he was pushing them to hard.
This situation put Henry in a dilemma, he knew that these 4 temporary staffs were capable of completing the targeted interviews if they put in effort. He needed to push them to work, but his previous approach had already strain their relationship and the situation would worsen if any of them decided to quit. If he chose to go soft on them, the quality of their interviews may not be acceptable.
As a junior consultant in the company, he did not want to let his managers know that he could not even handle 4 temporary staffs well.
Henry needed a way to work things out with his 4 temporary staffs himself within the next 2 weeks. What should he do?
