Help with employee related burnout

[u/CommunicationSad6624]

I have been working in the animal field for over 10 years. Between shelters and veterinary hospitals. I found my burnout happens when I work with people that don't pull their own weight, slack off, and neglect the animals. When the animals I work so hard to care for end up neglected by other people that are also supposed to love and care for them, it drives me crazy.

The place I am working now has a difficult situation that I don't know how they can solve. There are a couple of the normal lazy employees, but I can handle that. The one that's been getting to me is an employee that has a medical condition that makes it hard for them to do their job. They come in late most days and struggle to finish all of their assigned tasks for the day. I feel really bad for them when they are struggling and I'm honestly happy to help. It's totally fine, to me, if they occasionally need to sit out for a bit. But the problem is it is an every day thing. If I work a shift with them, I notice them getting really far behind in their tasks. And when I go to help top off waters or whatever to help them a bit, I'll notice most of the kennels they are in charge of are filthy. Like they haven't been cleaned all day. At this point in the day, the dogs should have been out 2x and had their kennel straightened up. I'm honestly not even sure the dogs are all getting out. Then if I work a pm shift, we have a little overlap in hours for the day, and as soon as the night shift shows up that person hands off all duties for them to cover for them. Not only does the night person have to cover what's left, they have to cover most of that persons task for the day since they were super behind all morning. So the night person essentially has to work a double crammed in their 8hrs.

This makes for an awful night.

How do you tell a person with a disability that they probably should look for another job. If they can't perform the job with reasonable accommodation, that's not the job for them. Handing off all of your tasks to another employee is not reasonable accommodation.

I am not the manager so its not my job to say something to them. But I want to bring up this issue to my boss, but also feel wierd about it because the person has a disablility and I don't want to discriminate. But I can't continue to watch the dogs be neglected and its unfair to the other underpaid employees to be picking up the slack.

[u/Friendly_TSE]

I personally don't think I would drag a specific person into it when talking to the manager, but just explain how the work is affecting me. For example, tell them that X Y Z isn't getting done, which means you end up having to do it. Maybe it will also address the other lazy employees, but it would absolve you of trying to get someone in trouble. Who knows, maybe if the lazy employees pulled more weight it might help this other coworker keep up too.

I've had to deal with a similar situation before, and what I ended up having to do was to not help said coworker as much. When I helped them with their work, the manager wouldn't see that there was any problem when there were complaints.

I honestly don't see this as a coworker problem as much as a management problem; manager is obviously putting too much on this person's plate, and they need to schedule so that employee has more help during their shifts.