How To Fire Someone

[livingdeb]

Although I have absolutely no experience in firing people, I still have opinions. Just like those childless people giving you ideas about how to raise your kids better. So here is some of that advice.

1. Actually fire the person. Tell them what they're doing wrong and how to fix it. Document and review with them the next three times they screw that up royally. Then fire them.

Do not say that you are doing away with their job when actually you still need all those duties to be done. That's being a chicken and a liar. (Probably there are also very good bureaucratic or financial or liability reasons or whatever I guess.)

2. Make sure that more than one person knows how to do each of the vital duties in your area.

Do not leave yourself in the lurch by firing the only person who knows how to do some of your vital duties.

3. When you do pretend to get rid of a job but you still need the duties done and you do leave yourself in the lurch, ask the company trainer to quickly train a couple of your people who have some relevant experience already and then to come back a month later and train the replacement. The urgency is a little imposing, but that's okay.

Do not ask the trainer to actually do all the data entry and filing for a month while you look for a replacement.

Do not ask someone for help from their team when the relevant part your team is at least five times as big as their entire team and when you brought this on yourself.

Comments

[fraeuleinchen.livejournal.com]

Grrr.

[texpenguin.livejournal.com]

The problem is that in well-established bureaucracies/companies (like where you work), they've hemmed themselves in with policy. The handbook gets thicker and thicker as rules are added, including reasons for dismissal, that at some point, the thinking flips, and if it's not specifically stated as a reason for dismissal, then you can't dismiss for it. And rarely is "Failure to complete one's duties" ever specifically listed as a reason for dismissal. So, even if you have a formal warning and write-up system in place, as all great bureaucracy/company does, if the offense can't be pegged to the handbook list, it can't be written up, and so you're stuck. If you fire someone without going through the write-up process, you'll likely get sued for wrongful dismissal. If you write up something not on the list, you'll run into trouble there too. So, the only way to get rid of bad employees that are bad for undocumentable reasons is to either cut their hours back to next to nothing until they quit (that's how the retail industry does it) or downsize the position away, like your office did.

Now, I completely agree with you that the company should have planned ahead for this! But as we all know, management rarely knows just what all their employees actually do in a day. Sorry you had bear the burden for a stupid move by management!

[livingdeb.livejournal.com]

I've heard that before. And I've seen lots of people oddly not get fired here. But I've seen someone almost get fired (two write-ups out of three) just for not getting as much work done as her co-worker. So I'm not totally sure what the rules are here. Thanks for the explanation, though.