The list of dangers that employers face in firing employees
is seemingly endless. How can you safely fire a poor performer who’s pregnant,
who’s on medical leave, or who just filed a workers’ compensation claim? What
about the employee with the perpetually bad attitude who also happens to be
trying to organize your workforce or complaining about discrimination?
The quick answer is that no amount of education, training,
or preparation can completely protect you and your company in these and other
difficult situations. But one thing you can do—and probably the most important
thing you can do—is to lay the proper groundwork for firing employees, says a
recent BLR Special Report.
That means giving truthful evaluations of their performance
at regular intervals, conducting fair and thorough investigations before firing
them for misconduct, following your company’s disciplinary procedures, and
documenting every decision you make every step of the way.
Give Frequent, Honest
Evaluations
Conducting regular performance evaluations offers a lot of
benefits, not the least of which are providing employees with guidance and
feedback, improving their performance, and increasing productivity overall. On
the other hand, failure to give regular evaluations or to fill them out
honestly can expose your company to all sorts of potential discrimination and
retaliation claims under federal and state employment laws.
Why are performance evaluations so necessary? Doesn’t it
seem that employees who aren’t doing a good job would know it? Unfortunately,
that frequently isn’t the case. In fact, studies have found that when asked to
rate themselves on a given skill, the poorest performers consistently gave
themselves above-average grades.
And then managers compound the problem by giving good
evaluations to problem employees. When you finally reach the point where you
can no longer put off firing an employee, he or she has no reason to think that
performance is a valid reason. “I’ve always received favorable evaluations. If
I were such a poor employee, my manager would have said so, right?”
Unfortunately, the only conclusion such an employee can
reasonably draw is that you had some other, nefarious reason for the
termination, such as race or age.
Watered down evaluations are too often the “smoking gun,”
making it appear to the jury that an employee was fired for some other reason
than the one the employer offers.
Train Your
Supervisors
If overly glowing evaluations are a problem in your company,
chances are it’s HR’s fault—not your supervisors’. Many companies provide
supervisors with little to no training on how to evaluate employees or exactly
how important honest evaluations are.
The irony is that the reason most supervisors give good
evaluations to bad employees is that they’re afraid employees will sue if they
get a bad evaluation. They don’t understand that their strategy (or lack of
one, depending on how you look at it) has the exact opposite effect from what
they intend. Rather than reducing the risk that an employee will sue, giving
good evaluations to employees who don’t deserve them can only turn out poorly
in the end—and that often means ending up in litigation.
Feel as if you’re all alone in HR? Take on a
partner—Managing an HR Department of One. Get more information.
Investigate if
Necessary
Before firing an employee for doing something illegal,
unethical, or just plain wrong, you have to decide whether the employee actually
did what he or she is accused of doing. To do that, you have to investigate the
allegations, somehow weeding through contradictory statements from different
witnesses and deciding who’s telling the truth.
It’s a difficult and thankless task, but a necessary one.
And it’s important enough that you need to make sure you entrust it to the best
possible person for the job. It’s your choice whether to hire an outside
investigator or lawyer or assign the task to someone within your company.
Source: HR
Daily Adviser
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