One thing you must never do is to shout, get angry or get upset. If you rant and rave at your subordinate, then it will make you appear despotic, and it will make the person you are shouting at feel victimized. This can result in people eventually feeling the need to ‘stand up to you’ and could potentially result in a full-scale mutiny.

Moreover, what you’re doing here is to completely misunderstand the terms of the agreement between you and your team members (this is a little different for parents).

Ultimately, when you oversee someone in a work setting, it only means that they agreed to work for your organization. It doesn't mean you have the supreme authority over them, and you certainly don’t have the right to reprimand them as a child. You might be their ‘superior’ in terms of work hierarchy, but you are equal in reality. So, what is really going on here is an agreement – the agreement is that they will do what you ask (within reason) in exchange for payment and workplace satisfaction.

If that agreement doesn’t work out, then either of you has the right to terminate it at any time. But you do not have the right to make them feel small.

Therefore, it’s highly important not to make this permanent and not to make it look as though you have lost your cool. Instead, just keep things polite and civil but carry out what you must do. And the easiest way to do that? That would be to have a clear set of rules and repercussions for not following those rules. For instance: people caught not working their full set of hours will be required to make up those hours in the evenings and weekends.

With a clearly defined set of actions and outcomes, you can carry out what needs to be done in a cool and collected fashion without making it personal and without it ever seeming ‘unfair’. It’s the same rule for everyone, they had prior warning and you are simply following a predefined set of instructions.

This is one more reason not to become ‘too’ chummy with your team though – it can make it hard when you do have to take this kind of action and it can lead to accusations of favoritism or personal feelings getting in the way.