As business owners, HR managers and vice presidents, we all know how tough employee termination can be. Every person working on your team has good and bad days and everyone has a life outside of work. Because we all feel human compassion for our coworkers and employees, it can be difficult to decide when it’s the right time to fire an employee.
Here at Business Success Consulting Group, we always work with businesses on correcting troublesome employees before termination is considered. One way in which this is done is by setting up a review process.
The review begins by:
- Collecting any reports you have. If you have nothing in writing, ask the parties that have previously discussed this employee’s issues with you to write down what they have observed.
- Pull the employee’s production statistics. From this you will be able to see whether the employee is doing his or her job.
You may find that the employee has been falsely vilified by others and has produced well consistently. In this case, you are no longer in the business of correcting that employee. Instead, you will have to change tactics and find the rumormonger that reported your productive employee as a bad apple.
However, assuming that there has been a drop in the employee’s production and/or there are valid written reports about this employee’s behavior, action can be taken.
The first action is corrective. Discover when the employee started having difficulty at work. It may be that he or she ran into something that was too challenging for them – but they were unable to get help. It could be that they took on new duties, but were not trained properly. It may be that they simply need to attend some webinars or have time to review the latest information pertaining to their job.
This can be easily resolved with just a little bit of elbow grease and investment in the employee.
However, if upon confrontation with the low production numbers or reports of poor conduct you or the employee are unable to discover what changed in their work life, it could be time to begin the termination process. Different companies have different policies regarding firing an employee, but the wheels should be set in motion. The employee, recognizing that he or she is about to lose their job, may shape up.
Firing an employee is one of the most difficult parts of being an executive.
Here at Business Success Consulting Group, we provide business coaching to professionals of all kinds. If your business is not expanding the way it should,
contact us today.
