Your biggest hurdle is your mindset. Work with a coach to change that, and your (work)life will improve. You are telling yourself all these stories about why everything is so important and needs to happen right now. If you continue to do that, you’ll reach a point where your body will just shut off. It’s already giving you very clear warning signs, listen to those!

Have a sit down with her and ask her what she thinks could help prevent this from happening again. Maybe some PTO to focus on school? Assigning her low-risk tasks for the time being? Have her calculations be double checked by a colleague, before they are finalized?

By not only addressing the problem with her, but also engaging her in finding the solution, you provide her with the opportunity to be open, transparent, and learn how to think in solutions rather than problems, which could be a very worthwhile investment that benefits both her and your business.

If your team has only been on for 4 months and are having negative attitudes already, then something isn’t going right. Have you asked them why they are so negative? Could it be that you’re trying too hard to be cool, at the expensive of being a good leader?

Yet, Europe is doing pretty well despite having regulation that allows employees to have their privacy in the workplace and doesn’t allow employers to monitor employees like that.

Overworking is absolutely bad for your health, when sustained for longer periods of time. A week every now and then won’t hurt, but months in a row is really bad for your health.

And it’s also bad for your business. Your productivity actually goes down when you work so much, to the point that it can become even less than what you would accomplish in a normal 40-hr workweek. When we overwork ourselves, our cognitive abilities reduce. We lose focus, make mistakes, lose our problem solving skills, overlook the obvious, etc.

So both for your personal health as well as for the health of your business: stop doing this!

You don’t have a laziness problem but a motivation problem, so you’ll have to uncover why you’re not motivated and address that. Work with a coach to figure that out, as it’s usually very hard to uncover these things by yourself.

I see a lot of typical American comments here, but European labour law is rather different. When an employee works too much hours across more jobs, all the employers can get fined for not complying with working time regulations. I suspect this is OP’s biggest concern.

I think however that it should be fine from that perspective if everything has been documented well, like the rules in de employment contract and staff handbook, the investigation into this suspected breach, the outcome of that investigation, correspondence on the subject with the person who reported it, the lawyers, and the employee, etc.

You’ve done what is expected: you took the report serious, you investigated thoroughly and found nothing suspicious, you’ve reissued the rules, and you’ve consulted a lawyer during all of this. You couldn’t have possibly done anything more.

As for the employee; as long as they meet their targets and are generally performing well, there likely isn’t much more you can do. Other than of course manage them on expectations, address fatigue as and when appropriate, etc. And maybe have a frank discussion about how happy the employee is in their role and if their expectations still align with the company and the role.

I personally wouldn’t go as far as investigate across continents, unless you have clear evidence of that suspected breach of non-competition.

It may as well have been a case of him helping out his nephew or something non-material like that.