OK, several people I respect have offered to help so I'm going to post my dilemma.
Say, I have two people in plum positions (well, it's plum where I work). It's not our concern how they got these jobs since I wasn't in charge of hiring at the time. One of these people does everything he's told to do, unless, he goes to sleep somewhere that I can't find him instead. He occasionally pulls a drunk and disappears completely for 2 or 3 days but has never been written up for this by his previous supervisor. (He's been written up twice in the last month by me). The other person, I'm thinking, must have some kind of passive aggressive thing going on. I'll talk to her about something that needs to change and she's all smiles and, nods and, understanding and then, she continues to do things exactly the way she was. I can never find her and she never communicates to me what she's doing. (She's been written up once in the past month) Together, out of 16 hours they are being paid for in a day, they work maybe 10 and I am paying other people to take up the slack. I need two people with initiative that like to stay busy. People that can communicate with each other and will say "I can do that if we change this time by 15 minutes" instead of "I can't do that". I mean, the woman actually said to me "I really don't want to do that" when I asked her to do part of her job!
I'm way to busy to be babysitting these people and they actually make more work for me when their positions were created to alleviate it.
I don't have to fire them. I'm not required to renew their 8 hour a day contracts. I can offer them a four hour contract instead. So where's the dilemma? you say.
This is their job, they don't have other people to support them. I'd be cutting their paychecks in less than half. They're not bad people.
That's it, I don't know how to do this. I don't know if I should do it.
We'll get to the hiring question later, I'm verklimpt (sic). This is the one that wakes me up at night.