Imagine working with a coworker who makes a lot of mistakes, misses required meetings, and is really messy. Would you try to help them do a better job, stay out of it, or talk to a supervisor?

In this story, one man is in this exact situation. He doesn’t want to get his coworker fired, but he is also sick of all the problems he’s causing.

Keep reading to see if you think he should talk to a supervisor about it or not.

WIBTA for going to our supervisor about an unprofessional coworker?

My coworker (24M) and I (21M) work in an office setting together and he does several things that are unprofessional, immature and hinder others’ ability to do work or creates more work for other people.

I truly do not feel like this is a petty issue because we have individual weekly metrics carefully tracked and his are by far the lowest in our team.

It seems like the team would work better without this coworker.

His performance wouldn’t bug me at all if it didn’t create more work for others.

He will leave tasks unfinished and make a mess of the office leaving both his belongings and supplies in strange places.

He makes frequent mistakes and they are often a massive deal to fix on every other member of the team.

He also often makes problems worse because he does not take responsibility for them quickly (despite our work being time sensitive) and the team is expected to pick up slack.

The mistakes are only part of the problem.

I am not entirely blaming him because I feel like our supervisors could be more hands on with him, but they are just as overworked as the team is.

However, he does multiple other unprofessional things on top of the poor performance that really frustrate me.

He struggles to speak clearly and professionally to the clients which makes several of them frustrated.

This coworker also brings up inappropriate political subjects and is frequently on his mobile phone chatting with his friends.

The list of problems continues…

He also chats up the building security guard often, distracting him from his job of protecting us.

Besides leaving messes everywhere, he also trashes the bathroom every time he uses it and has broken multiple appliances because he’s very rough with handling anything.

We have co-ed single bathrooms and the women literally clean the seat after he uses it. One of our female coworkers once told me she feels like his mom because of how much she cleans up after him.

OP has tried to help his friend.

Despite all this, I have attempted to give him polite help with his performance, by sending him tracking spreadsheets and other tools I have personally found helpful for managing work when the conversation comes up, and always with permission, but he never uses them or looks at them.

I’ve never been malicious or rude and I genuinely care about his success. I fear his job is genuinely in jeopardy already because he missed our regularly scheduled, required meetings often and unplanned, and our supervisors are the one’s who have to fix his issues.

I don’t want bringing my issues up to be the last straw for him because he’s a nice guy I consider a friend, but his work performance both in the metrics and softskills is affecting the team and I feel like I really need to say something.

We are a very competitive company and firing for performance is not unheard of. WIBTA or am I just being unreasonable about my expectations of professionalism and work ethic?

I know this employee doesn’t want to get his coworker and friend fired, but it really sounds like he deserves to be fired.

Let’s see what Reddit has to say about this situation.

Here’s a vote for talking to the supervisor.

Another person shares where they draw the line.

Here’s another vote for talking to the supervisor.

This person seems to assume the coworker will get fired.

You can’t ignore the mistakes forever.

If you liked this post, you might want to read this story about a teacher who taught the school’s administration a lesson after they made a sick kid take a final exam.