How Do I Find Out What's Really Going on With My Employee?

An employee has been off for weeks and you still do not actually know why. You have a theory, and you are quietly running the business around that theory, but nobody has sat down and asked them the actual question.

This happens constantly in Australian small businesses: owners act on assumptions about what is going on with their people instead of finding out, and it costs them good staff, good decisions and a lot of wasted energy. Here is why assumptions creep in as a business grows, and exactly how to ask the kind of question that gets you the real answer instead of your best guess.

What is actually going on when you think you already know

In most cases you do not actually know what is going on with an employee, you have just stopped asking and started assuming. Assumptions feel efficient because they are instant, but you are trading accuracy for speed, and the gap between what you assumed and what is true is where bad decisions live.

The solution is not more intuition or more experience, it is a different kind of conversation, one built around genuine curiosity rather than confirming what you already believe.

If you are running a small team, you know the feeling of putting out one fire and turning around to find three more waiting. You do not always have the headspace to dig into why someone seems checked out or short with customers lately, so you fill the gap with your best guess instead: they are not committed, they are job hunting, they are just being difficult. It is not laziness, it is survival, when you are herding cats all day the shortcut of deciding you already know what is going on is tempting.

The trouble is that shortcut is usually wrong, and acting on it is how you lose a good employee or turn a small performance issue into a much bigger one.

Why business owners stop asking and start assuming

I saw this pattern clearly years ago during a research project in criminology and forensic psychology, long before I ever worked with business owners. We showed three age groups, kindergarten, year three and year six, the same short video: a sports field, a bag sitting on the ground, then the bag gone and a person walking through frame. There was no footage of the bag actually being taken. The youngest children said they did not know what happened and kept asking questions. The year three group started exploring a few possible explanations but stayed open minded about it. The year six group decided, with total confidence, that the person in frame must have taken the bag.

Curiosity dropped as the children got older, and false certainty took its place. The same shift happens in business owners as they gain experience. The longer you have been running your business, the more pattern matching you have built up from past staff, past situations and past mistakes, and the faster you jump from a single observation to a confident conclusion without ever checking whether that conclusion is actually right. That confidence feels like good instinct.

More often, it is just an old assumption wearing a new employee's face.

What a curious conversation looks like when you are hiring

The solution to all of this can be applied everywhere, starting with who you bring into the business in the first place. Most job interviews run on surface level questions such as why did you apply for this role, which invites a rehearsed, generic answer that tells you almost nothing.

A more curious question, such as describe the kind of business you want to join, the culture and the way you want to be led, forces a real answer because there is no stock response ready to go. The quality of your question directly sets the quality of the answer you get back, and in a job interview that is the only real data you have to work with.

Do not stop at one good question either. Be ready to follow up, ask for an example, ask what that actually looked like in their last role, ask what they would do differently next time.

Candidates who are a genuine fit will welcome the chance to go deeper. Candidates who are telling you what they think you want to hear tend to run out of specifics fast, and that gap is exactly what you need to see before you make an offer, not three months after you have made one.

What a curious conversation looks like with the team you already have

The same approach matters just as much once someone is already on your payroll. Business owners come to me frustrated by an employee, worried about their job satisfaction, or convinced someone is a flight risk and quietly looking elsewhere, and my first question is always the same: have you actually asked them what is going on? The honest answer is almost always no.

They have jumped straight to assumptions, decided there is no point having the conversation, or convinced themselves the employee will not open up anyway. All it usually takes is one curious conversation, sometimes a couple, to understand what is really happening, and once you know that, you actually have something to act on.

This applies just as much to your best people as your struggling ones. A reliable employee who goes quiet in a weekly catch up is not automatically fine just because they are not causing problems. Checking in with a genuinely curious question, rather than a quick how is everything that invites a one word answer, is how you catch a flight risk or a burnout problem while it is still small enough to fix.

What is the difference between a curious conversation and a normal check in

A normal check in often asks for a status update. A curious conversation asks an open question about how someone is actually experiencing their work, and then genuinely listens to the answer instead of moving straight to a solution.

When should I have a curious conversation instead of just managing the issue

As soon as you notice a change in someone's behaviour, performance or attitude and you catch yourself explaining it with a guess rather than a fact. That guess is your signal to ask, not to act.

What happens if I keep assuming instead of asking

You miss red flags and early warning signs, problems grow larger than they ever needed to be, and you end up making decisions, including performance or termination decisions, based on half the picture.

How do I ask a curious question without it feeling like an interrogation

Ask one open question, then stay quiet and let the silence do the work. Resist the urge to fill the gap with your own theory before they have had the chance to answer in their own words.

Does this apply to harder conversations too

It applies even more. Curiosity is what gets you to the real issue before a difficult conversation becomes necessary, and it is what keeps a difficult conversation from turning into an argument once you are in it.

Guessing your way through a performance issue versus asking your way through it

Picture two versions of the same situation. In the first, an employee has become withdrawn and less productive, and the owner decides privately that they have checked out and started planning around replacing them, becoming cooler and more distant in every interaction along the way. The employee notices the shift, assumes they are already on the way out, and disengages further, which confirms the owner's original assumption and makes it feel justified.

Nobody has actually said anything true to each other the whole time.

In the second version, the owner notices the same withdrawal and instead asks a direct, curious question about how the employee is finding things lately, without leading with a complaint. The answer might reveal a workload problem, a conflict with a colleague, or something personal, and whatever it is, the owner now has something real to respond to instead of a story they invented themselves. The business outcome in the second version is almost always better, and it is usually achieved in less time than the slow, assumption driven version takes to play out.

Curiosity is not a soft skill you deploy when you have spare time, it is the fastest route to the truth you need in order to make a good decision. Every assumption you act on without checking it first is a bet, and in a small business you cannot afford to keep losing those bets on your best people.

If this is a mental shift you know you need to make, more curious and less certain, that is exactly the kind of thinking we work through inside PowerBoss, helping business owners build the judgement and the confidence to lead well instead of just reacting. If you want to talk through what might actually be going on in your business before you act on an assumption, book a complimentary 15-minute clarity call and we will work through it together.