Learn to manage difficult employees with positive strategies, avoid conflicts and build stronger and better relationships and teamwork at the workplace.

Introduction

Managing difficult employees is one of the most complex and unavoidable challenges in today’s workplace. From persistent negativity and poor performance to workplace conflict, absenteeism, and disruptive behaviour, these issues can significantly impact morale, productivity, and organisational culture if left unaddressed.

Difficult employees can take many forms. “Difficult” can manifest itself in quite a few ways, oftentimes, including people who spread rumors, who find the negative in everything, those who rarely cooperate, or who don’t value the input and opinions of others. They may find every opportunity to create problems or they may simply use passive resistance to waylay your best efforts to move your agenda forward.

Therefore, it is important to develop skills in dealing with difficult employees. You must be savvy in dealing with such difficult behaviors in order to be successful in your leadership career.

The one-day training course is designed to the participants with the practical skills, behavioural insights, and modern AI-enabled tools needed to effectively manage workplace challenges—while building stronger, more resilient teams. Participants will learn how to avoid conflict through healthy confrontation and actions that build stronger and better relationships at the workplace.

Course Details: 

Learning Objectives

Upon the completion of this training, participants will be able to:

• Deal with difficult employees such as:

  • Late arrivals and early departures on a regular basis;
  • Unexcused excessive absenteeism; disrespectful, abusive, vulgar, or rude language towards co-workers, managers and/or customers; poor attitude toward the company and/or co-workers;
  • Constant complaints, gossip or other disruptive behaviours that bring down employee morale; and poor or unprofessional job performance and/or quality of work.

• Learn the skills to manage difficult bosses who impact the employees’ desire to engage and contribute at work.

• Learn how to build effective relationships with bosses and co-workers that create success and satisfaction on the job.

• Improve team performance, morale and workplace culture

• Use AI tools to draft difficult conversation scripts, analyse difficult employee behaviours and identify root causes and patterns early.

Who should attend

• HR professionals and HR business partners

• People managers and team leaders

• Supervisors and department heads

• Business owners and organisational leaders

Outline

• Why You Must Deal With Difficult Employees?

  • Situation won’t get better if left unaddressed, it usually gets worse. They create unnecessary complexity, strife and worst of all stress.
  • Constant complaining can quickly earn you the title of whiner or complainer.
  • Doubts about your leadership and competence in dealing with difficult situation.

 

• Overcome Your Fear of Confrontation and Conflict

  • Mastering confrontation is difficult, no doubt about it. We usually have a really hard time expressing how we feel in a straightforward and frank manner that resolves conflict.
  • Some tips on how to overcome the fear of confrontation and conflict.

 

• How to hold Difficult Conversation to Tackle Other’s Annoying Habits and Issues

  • Identify what are difficult conversations which primary subject matter is potentially contentious and/or sensitive and may elicit strong, complex emotions that can be hard to predict or control.
  • Guideline, tips and best practices in Handling Difficult Conversations.
  • Ways of tackling annoying behaviours and habits

 

• How to Deal With a Bully

  • 7 Ways to deal with Bully @ Work
  • 10 Tips to Overcome Bully

Outline

• How to Manage a Negative Person

  • How do you help someone who is always negative?
  • What do you say to a negative person?
  • How do you deal with someone with a negative attitude?
  • How to Keep the Negative Attitudes of Others from Impacting You?

 

• How to Manage Gossip

  • Why do people gossip and how do avoid it?
  • Steps to deal with gossip?

 

• How to Manage Difficult Bosses

  • What are “Difficult Bosses”
  • 7 strategies to manage a Difficult Boss

 

• How to Deal with Difficult Co-worker

  • 7 Tips to deal with Difficult Co-Worker
  • On Your Own – How should you behave?

 

• How to Manage a High-Performing Employee With a Bad Attitude

  • 5 ways to deal with bad-attitude high performers

 

• Develop Effective Work Relationship

  • Why Have Good Relationships?
  • Defining a Good Relationship
  • Where to Build Good Relationships
  • How to Build Good Work Relationships

Trainer

 

Michael Giam is an international business professional with decades of senior management experience working in highly complex and cross-cultural business environments. Michael’s international breadth of experience spans both in public institutions and private corporations focusing mainly on business fundamentals and human capital to establish clear and achievable strategic business goals.

From a Senior HR Business Partner to Senior Vice President, Michael has worked for several MNCs including CWT Distribution Limited (Singapore), International Data Corporation (USA), the Millennium & Copthorne International Hotels Group (Singapore), Marriott International (in China) and Melco China Resorts (Holding) Limited (Macau). In his tenure at CWT, Michael was appointed by the CEO as the Management Representative to lead in corporate culture development and change. He has developed, implemented and coached several action programs that were necessary for the development of a learning culture within the organization and beyond. 

Michael received his MBA from an Australian University and holds an Advanced Certificate in Training and Assessment (Facilitated Learning). He is a registered Practicing Management Consultant (PMC), a recognized SkillsFuture Mentor for SMEs in Singapore and also a Certified Senior Professional with IHRP Singapore.

Administrative Details:

Scheduled Dates

• 12 November 2026  (Face-to-Face)  (8th Run) - Confirmed

• 19 March 2027  (Face-to-Face)  (9th Run)

Online/Virtual

• Available for in-company customised training

Duration / Venue

• One day

• 9.00 am to 5:00 pm

• Hotel Grand Pacific Singapore  (8th Run)

Certification

A Certificate of Attendance will be awarded at the end of the course.

 

Cost

• S$ 675.80 w/GST (S$620.00) for Community/Corporate Subscriber

• S$ 708.50 w/GST (S$650.00) for Non-Subscriber

Funding

• Grants/Subsidies/SkillsFuture Credit are not applicable.

IHRP CPD Hours 

• 7

(Please refer to the IHRP website)

Refreshment

• Coffee & tea with snacks during the morning and afternoon breaks

• Lunch will be provided

Past Participants:

Past Participants' Comments

• "Majority of the course content is useful and applicable to my work!"

• "Very informative and enlightening session".

Past Participant Organisations

• Aver Asia (S) Pte Ltd

• Cold Storage Singapore (1983) Pte Ltd, China Jingye Engineering Corporation Limited (Singapore Branch)

• Dormakaba Production Gmbh & Co. Kg.

• E.SUN Bank

• Grace (S.C.C.) Church

• Hwa Chong International School, Heraeus Shin-Etsu Quartz Singapore Pte Ltd

• Koei Tecmo Singapore Pte. Ltd.

• MIT Semiconductor Pte Ltd, Metalor Technologies (Singapore) Pte Ltd

• NV5 Private Limited, Nanyang Girls' High School, NIIT (USA) Inc. - Singapore Branch

• Pearl Marine Logistics Pte Ltd, Piab Asia Pte Ltd

• Ren Ci Hospital

• Sato Kogyo (S) Pte Ltd, Singapore Medical Association, SMRT Trains Ltd, Singapore Medical Association

• Thales DIS (Singapore) Pte Ltd

• Wing Tai Investment Management Pte Ltd, WRITERS AT WORK Enrichment Centre Pte Ltd

• Ye Liang How Catering Service Pte Ltd