Today, I had an interesting issue with this one colleague who tries his best not to do his job.
A couple months ago, he asked to takeover a particular task. I trained him for 3-5 hours with him shadowing me and me guiding him through the process. The deadline for this task is Friday he hasn't done a thing. Today he pings me and tells me he doesn't know what he has to do (despite the training already provided). I asked him that he needed to pull a specific report and he pulled the wrong one. I politely tell him it is the wrong report and he needs to pull XYZ instead. I asked him to replicate the exact same filtering as I did previously (and I attached an example) and send it to me.
The filtering consists of hiding empty columns and a few irrelevant columns (if you follow the example, you can obviously see which columns need to be hidden by following the alphabetical order).
He then asked me to set up a meeting of 40 MINUTES for him to work on the filtering/column hiding and me looking at him while he's doing it. I am sorry, but I am not going to sit there for 40 minutes while I watch him hide columns on an Excel. I told him to try it on his own by looking at the example I provided, send it across to me for a cross-check and if all OK, I'll sign off for him to forward it to the stakeholder.
He refused and set up a 40 minutes meeting nonetheless. I politely replied and asked the meeting to be reduced to 20 minutes as I'm swamped with urgent deliverables. I don't need to be sitting there for 40 minutes while he hides columns on an Excel, it is stupid. He is not a trainee or a graduate worker. He's an experienced hire. Then he complained about how I committed to helping him and this is a priority task and how he only got his accesses sorted on Friday.
Well, he got his accesses sorted on Friday, so why did he wait until today pull this report? Additionally, the columns don't even need to be hidden. I hide them to make the file more readable and pleasant, but it is not a critical task. I don't need to be sitting there for 40 minutes watching him doing this while I'm swamped with urgent work. I asked to reduce the meeting to 20 minutes because I know the filtering only takes this long and I was swamped. He wasn't happy with that and went on a rant by email. I'm meeting him halfway by accepting an unnecessary meeting and cutting it to the absolute necessary and he goes on a rant.
The worst part is at the end of his email, he wrote "if this is not finished in 20 minutes, you are accountable to follow up on this". I mean, who does he think he is? I know how long it takes to do each task and quite frankly, no one in their right mind asks another person to watch them hide columns on an Excel.