How do I supervise employees who don't get along? [View all]

[alarimer]

This is the first time I have ever been a supervisor. I am in WAY over my head here. They should never have hired me. Never. I am shit at communicating, first off and I avoid things and situations that make me uncomfortable. But here we are, so in order for me not to get fired when my probationary period ends, I need to help improve the situation. It is not going to be solved overnight and may never be a picnic but there have to be changes.

I have two employees I supervise. They hate each other. One hates her job and complains incessantly about how she does all the work but gets crapped on, no matter what, and complains that she does more work than the other (not necessarily true I might add). Now, both of them do the job well enough. It is not a job performance issue. That would be easy.

The second employee basically does what she wants to do, and ONLY what she wants to do, avoids doing things or going in the field when she doesn't want to go. People have learned to work around that, which they shouldn't necessarily have done. It is why the first employee never asks the second one to help her with stuff.

One possible solution (that I don't really want to use) is to make assignments every single day. No, they know what needs to be done, far better than I do because they have been here much longer. And I do not want to be a micro-manager. At all. Everybody hates that.