Employer's guide to handling difficult employees

July 8, 2008

To stay legal, you must contact the third-party (Office Gossip)

Handling difficult employees? Here's what you must do before they destroy your business.

To stay legal, you must contact the third-party administrator for your health coverage or your benefits department about the fired worker's change of status. When beginning to craft an employee separation notice, begin first by identify the governing policy or formal rules in place. This is an incident of misconduct or lackluster productivity similar to other recent events. Other rationale for job termination are more distasteful. Meet with Personnel Individually: Understand that some employees will find the dismissal more difficult to accept. The individual firing executive level personnel should keep this in mind and reinforce the decision with proof of misconduct, poor work, or whatever caused the firing.

Certainly, if you're laying off the worker due to the business's financial difficulties or owing to downsizing, you should make clear this as well. Since workforce will know these are stupid reasons, they will believe you separated them for an improper reason which you can't talk about. Not only do you want the notification to be sensitive to the jobholder's feelings, but you also need to give recorded reasons for the dismissal. The Second Early Warning Sign of Employee Insubordination: Incompetence. Under Boss's Expectations, you give the worker the measurable goals and behaviors which serve as the performance guideline. The idea of this sample dismissal memorandum is to make it easy for any member of your management team to fill out. This will help to avoid improper employee separation claims. Then make Tuesday the effective dismissal date and inform the worker to return Tuesday to get his final check. Therefore, telling the problem individual how you feel is a one-way ticket to career failure.

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Handling difficult employees? Here's what you must do before they destroy your business.