Especially when its to save the three jobs of people who don’t pitch in. Hard working employees really really like to take paycuts when someone else wanders around the office without doing much of anything for their check.
Also, if you start giving people a job for life, they start taking advantage of it. It does you no favors (in a place where its nearly impossible to get even laid off - much less fired, you end up with a lot of employees who don’t work very hard) and it does them no favors (a LITTLE job insecurity encourages people to maintain a current skill set and ask themselves if THEY wouldn’t be better off somewhere else).
I cannot understand why you have not fired them for cause long before now.
I’m a pro-labor guy, but such things offend me. If I were a co-worker and saw such behavior and management gave them a pass (which you have, until now) I would feel slighted. These are morale killers.
It could be worse. I was let go about two months ago. My position was eliminated company wide. My direct supervisor was not allowed to notify me–it was done through a conference call with our regional director who I had never met. We were also given 35 days notice. Why 35 days I don’t know. We were expected to work through those 35 days and train our coworkers on our jobs. Not fun.
We were encouraged to apply for other positions in the company. Last I checked those who applied for other positions are still waiting to hear back on them. On my last day my severance documents were emailed to me and then I received a call from a HR person to go over them. At no time was my supervisor involved except to ask me how I was doing.
If there is ANY chance of violence or active resistance, have a large man in a loose-fitting suit slouching quietly in the corner or have him approach the room from a hidden spot as soon as the door closes and stand by the door (if there is clear glass, obviously, he does not show himself.
Of course, this is the first person to tell - the presence of such a man tells everybody what is going down - and you don’t want the potential problem to know in advance.
No wonder the company isn’t doing well.
If the highest paid workers just wander around all day, who would want to do any work at all?
Why the heck should it be kept secret from the employee what they have done that led to the firing? Firing someone because of poor performance cannot be used against you. That’s just cause. People don’t have some weird legal right to keep collecting pay in spite of not even trying to do their work. I guess if you hired them for one thing and somehow changed the job along the way maaaaybe they could have some sort of case, but it doesn’t sound like anyone was asked to work outside of the scope of their job. People deserve to know why they are being terminated so they can learn from the experience, and if you aren’t illegally discriminating, why is it best to keep them in the dark?
Cutting out the dead weight is not fun, but it’s in the interest of the workers actually working. If things don’t pick up, that’s more people out of jobs, dragged down by these folks.
Actually regarding the person that will be the most painful, she was asked to work outside the scope of her job. Since she had extra time she was asked to assist with patient triage when she wasn’t busy which she did for a day or two and then decided it “wasn’t her job”. Her degree is not in nursing but she was asked to assist the nurses when they got in the weeds. She’d rather talk to the people in other departments than learn those jobs or simply due independent busy work like setting up surgery rooms hours before the procedures or manually copying schedules already generated by the software and are on the screens through the clinic if you just look up.
I feel like it would be kicking them when they are down. I don’t have a paper trail to prevent an unemployment claim and wouldn’t do that anyway. “I have to let you go due to lack of volume in your field,” is a lot nicer than “I have to let you go because your work ethic and initiative sucks and you are a drain on the company.”
Interesting story about this. No employees complained to me or their direct supervisors. These people that are being terminated were employed first and had completely different jobs so there really wasn’t a competition about who does more work.
However, when I needed to investigate specifics of one woman’s job description to make sure I had people qualified to pick up the slack, I got an unexpected earful of bitterness and resentment.
Stick to what you are good at, and have an employment law lawyer and her team do what they are good at.
Use an employment law lawyer draft out a plan for you and check every scrap of paper related to the dismissal (employee departure check-list, termination letter, reference letter, employment counselling package, full and final release including release signing bonus, unemployment docs and regulatory shit, final regular payment and severance payment, etc.) so that there is nothing missed that could bite you in the ass later.
Have the employment law lawyer send an experienced agent to conduct the dismissal at which the agent, you and the employee will attend. Meet ahead of time with the agent for the agent to prepare you for the meeting. Keep the meeting respectful, short (5-10 min.), thorough, and as far as possible, keep your mouth shut and let the agent handle the meeting.
Litigation is very expensive. Some things in life tend to attract litigation – one of these is employment termination. Use a pro to reduce risk of litigation.
It is common to tie extra severance to a signed no-argument agreement. I was rudely bounced from a job, and got everything I was legally entitled to, and an offer of 3 additional months’ severance if I signed a no-contest agreement. I checked with a lawyer, who agreed I’d been screwed and could fight, but there was nothing much to gain from it. I took the $10k and never looked back.
(I did flip the building off every time I drove by, until the very last time on my way out of CA when I blew them a kiss.)
This is the least lawyerly way I can think to explain it: if you tell you’re firing them because of their job performance, you are effectively inviting them to call you on it.
Then the employee sues, and the jury hears that the employee has no written warnings on file, and the employee was “counseled” regarding her job performance verbally. Then the jury decides that the employer is full of shit and the reason given was a pretext, and finds that the employee was discriminated/retaliated against and awards her lots of money.
Even if their performance is shitty and you can prove it, that’s not going to help much. For example, most jurisdictions (even right to work states) require the employer to prove misconduct to defeat an unemployment claim. That’s a high standard, much greater than “just cause” - and certainly higher than “not doing much work”.
On the other hand (back in the litigation world) if you say “volume is down”, and you open your books and show that (1) it is, and (2) you let three highly compensated employees go, the jury nods and tells the employee “tough shit”.
Some things are not Foxy’s problem. People need to develop some introspection and be able to self evaluate - if you can’t, that isn’t the problem of the employer who fires you, the girl who won’t go out with you, the coach of the team you didn’t make.
Its enough to fire you - it isn’t enough to avoid litigation, and since the outcome of such litigation is determined by juries - it isn’t enough to avoid a settlement. But the point isn’t really the settlement - the moment the employee goes out and gets themselves an attorney, you start accruing legal fees yourself - the employee is likely to eventually settle without it getting to jury (and you hope that it does, juries like people not companies since juries tend to be made up of people), but you will be out your legal fees and they aren’t settling for less than theirs. If you do end up in court, the best case in something like this is that you don’t pay anything to the employee - but you are likely to still be out your costs.
Which is why she doesn’t get the severance unless she signs a general release form. If I have to pay her severance on litigation fees, that will be her choice.
When I was laid off a few years ago, I was in the US on an E3 visa, which was tied to my employment. Basically, I had 10 days notice to leave the country. My employer gave me 2 weeks’ salary as severance. It only occurred to me later that they could have offered me a month at half-time to allow me to get my affairs in order for the same cost.