Luis

1. If the employee is a problem now and you could not fix it, then the employee will always be a problem.

2. When you fire the employee, the other people at your company are going to say “what took you so long” – mark my words.

3. Overall performance will increase from the remaining employees, because the distraction is gone and they don’t have to fix problems that employee caused.

4. Your clients will be grateful and respect you more as a leader of your company.

5. Credentials and certificates can be acquired many ways… but innate talent (attitude being a big one) cannot. Hire the next person on attitude, energy and intelligence and assign them the job of getting the credential.

Wishing you the best of luck. Firing someone is always hard, and it should be – after all that means you have care for your people and that is noble. Now you need to show care for the business (which means caring for the majority of people) and let the one bad one go.

- Mike

Question: This employee has a credential that is required for our facility to maintain our relationship with a national company. Finding good employees with this credential isn’t easy, and we will lose our designation if he goes. We can continue to do business as usual, but I’m asking if we should just take this chance while I continue the search for his replacement, or keep him on until I can find someone.

His absence will cause some changes but will not hurt us in any way. In fact, it should help us gleen new customers that won’t come to us because of him.

I apologize if this isn’t quite what this post is for, but I respect everyone’s opinions and experiences, so I hope to draw from that. Thank you for your time, and advice would greatly be appreciated.

I was not giving my last check. Not even sure if I was paid up though today, even.

All I know is that I will receive my vacation time owed to me and thirty (30) days health insurance coverage.

So, according to your checklist, my boss handled it (the letting go) well, and not so well.

Best,

-K
http://www.for-the-troops.com/shop/
Now that I am without a job, I can now focus my energies on our site- dedicated to the men & women of our Armed Forces. And when you shop at our site, we donate 10% of after-tax proceeds to military charities.

For example, plan to let the employee go on a Monday at 10am before lunch. This gives them several hours to be by themselves before they have to go home and face their families. The Monday gives them a full week to grieve, plan, and be proactive before a weekend occurs. Monday at 10am gives you the opportunity to have a lunch meeting with remaining employees to discuss the strategy and mission and how the termination is to be communicated to customers and suppliers.

It allows for team meetings in the afternoon to discuss specific roles and action plans, fine tune communications with customers and suppliers, and discover any potential problems to be addressed.

It gives you the remaining days of the week to gauge the morale and act accordingly, and gives you the repeated opportunity to empower your team. (You don’t want to let people go on a Friday leaving your remaining people stewing at home over a weekend with no opportunity to communicate with them.)

There is one KEY LESSON here though – that you are setting a PRECEDENT on how you treat employees. Every time someone is fired you need to treat them the same when the circumstances are the same.

- Mike

As much as I dislike lawyers, employees have some powerful legal rights and in the litigious times we live in you better get legal advice.

Finally “cushion it with cash” is a ludicrous idea. A disgruntled employee can easily turn that against you. “Mr Smith, if you were unhappy with your employee’s performance, why did you give him cash? It looks like a bribe etc…”