Earlier in my career I worked in a couple of mundane, grind-y jobs like call centers and data entry work. Most of these employees actually work for contacting agencies who place them in assignments lasting anywhere from several weeks to several months or a year. So they’re not really employees of the contracting company at all.
My experience has been that 75% of these employees are middle-aged to older people, who tend to be not very skilled or educated and don't have ambitions to work anything more challenging. These people usually have families and normal social lives, so you can get along with them. Another 20% are younger folks, either recent college grads trying to move up the job ladder or people who are focused on outside work like acting, music, art etc. They’re also ok to get along with, but turnover is high with this group.
Then there’s the 5% who range from "socially inept creep" to "totally nutty" to "actively dangerous". These are the types who are asocial and unpleasant to deal with, and they do their job just barely enough to keep from being fired. They also tend to be confrontational, so turnover is again fairly high. Most of them get completely worked up over minor issues like receiving so-so performance reviews, and usually they can't handle criticism or follow rules that they don't want to. These types make life harder for the 95% of employees who just want to do their job, either by being lazy and forcing others to pick up their tasks or by being territorial about their product and leaping to conclusions about others.
We once had an employee, a very obese man who also claimed to be a former veteran, who wouldn't work much and spent a good part of each day drawing anime girls in his notepad. After receiving a poor performance review he made a joke about bringing a gun in and shooting his computer on the production floor. Needless to say management didn't take this well, but when they reprimanded this guy for being scary he just ramped up the tension and made every interaction with him into a life-or-death confrontation. Soon enough I didn't see him around anymore.
We also had an employee (I was a team lead by this time) who was so-so with his work product and didn't really improve in his six months with the company. After I had to ask him to improve the quality of his work, he started dropping shifts and taking more and more time off work. Eventually it got to a point where we put him on a 60-day PIP and he immediately went to HR and complained about discrimination and harassment by management. This was a tricky one to resolve as there were numerous hoops to jump through with HR including rigorously documenting each interaction with this employee and updating our scale which we used to grade employee performance. He eventually up and left the company with no notice on the last Monday of the month, leaving behind an entire month's worth of work he didn't do and which forced us to give OT to all the employees just to finish this guy's work on time.
I guess my point is that there's always a certain % of people in mundane, low-effort jobs who are just toxic. These are people with severe psychiatric issues; the narcissistic ones try and overstep their boundaries and disrupt the workplace, usually by "suggesting" changes to the workplace which, funnily enough, always make their own jobs easier while piling additional work onto others. Then when management tries to shut them down, they make a big fuss and act out until they get shipped to another department or just out the door. I hope it's clear by now that I'm putting Shame in this last box, and my experience with this type of employee has been to just disengage, leave them in the corner where they can't make too much of a mess, and hope they stay quiet while they get the help they need or just move on to another workplace with relatively little drama.
“
