There´s an insidious problem lurking in workplaces nationwide, and it´s not the obvious bad hires or misfits that simply don´t belong on the payroll. Those people are usually terminated during their probationary period and life goes on. Costly? Yes. A headache? Yes. But it´s not something that´s going to poison your workplace. What infects workplaces is the poison apple - the employee who is otherwise slouching adequately through the workday, but whispering his or her thoughts of discontent, dislike and disgruntlement to anyone who will listen.

One bad apple can indeed spoil the whole bunch. A bad employee spreading discontent can quickly lower the trust of the good employees on your staff, simply by talking too much trash. Pretty soon, everybody starts feeling that negativity day to day. The collective attitude of your staff plummets, job performance dips, and when customers start feeling the effects, you´ve got a full-blown crisis.

One way to combat this infection before it takes hold is by using an employee opinion survey to take the pulse of your staff. You can ask questions to reveal how employees feel about a myriad of issues in the workplace, from pay and benefits to communication and management effectiveness. You should ask for suggestions of specific changes an employee would like to see, and allow for open-ended comments after each response...

By asking for employee opinions, you are administering the antidote to the poison of discontent spread by the bad apple. By showing that you know things aren´t perfect in the workplace, you´re telling your employees that you care about their feelings, and that you value their ideas and suggestions.

But, all employee surveys are not created equal. Here are some tips for a successful survey:

• Make sure it´s anonymous. People aren´t going to share their true feelings if they fear recrimination.
• Use a third party to administer the survey. If you´re standing there in the conference room while people fill out their surveys, I can guarantee that you won´t hear the truth. Assure your employees that you won´t so much as touch, see or smell individual surveys and that survey responses will only be reported as group statistics with anonymous comments grouped together.
• Make it easy for employees to participate. Offer options, like paper-based, Internet  or automated-telephone surveys.

Here is the most important tip of all:

• Follow up on what you learn. Share survey results with your employees. Make concrete changes, sooner rather than later. If you survey the opinions of your employees and then disregard what they´re telling you, you will have squandered every ounce of good will you generated with the survey itself, and create some new bad apples in the process.

Sometimes, however, surveying alone isn´t enough to counteract the effects of the problem employee. In that case, you´re looking at a termination. It´s a difficult thing, knowing when to fire someone, especially when he or she hasn´t really done anything overtly wrong except carry a chip on his or her shoulder.

When deciding to terminate an employee, consider these points:

• Do you find yourself grumbling every day about a particular employee?
• Do you have a certain employee who "just gets by" doing the minimum amount of effort each day, and your other employees know it?
• Do you find yourself apologizing to other employees for a particular employee whom you know is not pulling his or her weight?

If any of these points sound naggingly familiar to you, you need to ask yourself why that employee is still in your employ? Keeping employees who have bad attitudes only serves to show good employees that you don´t care. You´re talking the talk but not walking the walk. If you don´t care, why should they?