There's a team lead who chooses to address the entire team whenever there is a problem with one employee. It's usually trivial to tell who is being referred to because the issue will be with something like, "two hour lunches", "chatting too much with staff who are not on break", "forgetting to clock out", etc. Situations where one can think to oneself, "Ah yeah, that'd be Steve" or "Yep, that's Alice."
I'm not really concerned with how to handle this situation at my own workplace but as a relatively young (aka inexperienced) professional looking to one day get into management, I'm curious how effective of a tool this is. Is it better to have an individual meeting with the employee who has behavior that needs to be addressed or is it a wise tactic to simply address the whole team?
Clearly the simple answer is, "It depends" but I think we can agree that we're intelligent enough to discern the obvious examples of that statement. I'd like to know, by-and-large, which is the more effective tactic?