u/DesperateAnswer8094

I’m lucky enough that I’ve never had to let anyone go before. I pride myself on my team building skills, and make a point to hire driven people. 5 weeks ago one of my higher ups hired someone for my department distantly related to them. This new hire is top tier nightmare material. I have witness reports of this employee doing the most out of pocket stuff, that would surely go viral on here but I don’t have the time to type it all out.
My branch is teeny tiny. I have less than 15 employees and it’s an open floor plan, with little to no privacy (to the point where I do my interviews and meetings at a separate location). Tomorrow morning I need to fire the employee, because my entire team has gone on strike and refuses to work with them (valid).
I have no security, no hr, and no private way to let go of a very explosive individual who is larger to me in size and double the audacity. I’ve asked my peers for advice and they said to rip the bandaid off, but none of them have seen this employee get genuinely upset. Is it over the top to want to ask the non emergency line if there’s an available officer to be on standby? Is that even an option? It’s also important to note that I am very small looking, so It’s very hard to get rude people to take me seriously. And since this employee has connections, they think they can get away with a lot (and they kind of have). Ive had nothing but sunshine and rainbows as employees so im kind of out of my element when something goes wrong (sorry for any managers that don’t get such luxury lol). Any advice is useful, but especially from managers of smaller stature with big responsibility:)

I (24M) am working my first real management position. I’m 2.5 weeks into my new job as a bakery manager and while I’m running into a lot of roadblocks, the biggest one is half my team only speaks Spanish and the other half only speaks English. I have 1 bilingual employee, but she has a lot of important tasks and can’t play translator for me. My bakery has an EXTREMELY strict no phones policy for kitchen staff, so they have to go to the employee locker room, grab their phones, and use an app to translate. This was fine for the first few days since we were slow but I noticed it was completely throwing us off on the weekend. I’ve asked other store managers in my district for advice but all of them are bilingual with no issue communicating with staff. Starting next week, I’m done training with experienced store managers and I’m on my own.
This whole situation is frustrating for me and my team. I’d love to take the time to learn conversational Spanish, but I’m working 65+ hours a week and it’s just impossible. Corporate is making no exceptions on the phone policy, and I’m afraid I’m going to either lose my staff, or lose my job if I can’t find a way to get things to run smoothly.

For additional context as to how this is throwing us off
\-it’s a brand new store so 70% of my staff is new and training, but all of the physical training guides I have access to are in English only, so they have to step away from their station to translate instructions
\-plans constantly change on a day to day basis, and it takes 10-15 minutes to translate conversations on my phone until I’m positive we understand each other
\-English speaking trainers are losing morale trying to teach without words
\-order miscommunication has lead to some extreme losses because Google Translate isn’t the best for explaining how to customize the product or its decorations to a customers liking. I’ve had to refund orders/ remake ones that got lost in translation.
\- my team is starting to form “clicks” meaning some days my Spanish speakers feel ignored by other staff and vice versa.
\-my Spanish speaking team appears to lack confidence when it comes to approaching me, leading to multiple small problems collecting without my knowledge.

Overall I’m trying to acknowledge and work with my everyone on my team, and i want to make them feel respected and confident. Does anyone have a system that works for them?

TLDR: I need a solution to improve communication with my non English speaking employees before I get fired for running this bakery into the ground 🫪