Knowing When--And Whether--To Fire
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Firing troublesome employees is one of the most unpleasant tasks a business owner can face. This isn't only unpleasant due to the emotional toll of knowingly depriving someone of a paycheck, but also due to the toll firing a bad employee takes on your business.
When you fire a bad employee, you're forced to invest additional money in training a replacement, and you're forced to spread additional work onto your existing employees, lowering the overall quality of work--and service--for everyone. So it's important to know just when and how to fire an employee in order to ensure that you minimize not only the weight on your own conscience, but the additional pressure placed on your business as a whole.
The first step in knowing when to fire a bad employee is knowing how to recognize one. For smaller businesses, this is an easier task: your bad employees will be in close proximity to you and your business partners, and you can observe for yourself whether your employee is exceeding or failing to meet your expectations. For larger businesses, you'll need to rely to a much greater extent on delegated responsibility.
This can become a delicate balancing act. Except in extreme cases, managers are often loath to fire employees, since this puts obligations on them to hire and train replacements. If an employee isn't meeting expectations, but not actually doing much material damage to the company, some managers will be willing to let them slide for some time, resulting in lost productivity and a lower quality of service for your company all around. So in order to check this tendency in some managers, you'll need to have a detailed employee work performance assessments system to help determine when it's necessary to let someone go.
There are many methods for assessing a bad employee, some worse than others. You could institute a "three strikes" rule, where any employee who commits three infractions of corporate policy within a certain period of time is automatically fired. Another option is setting employee performance objectives that require regular performance appraisals of all employees at three or six month intervals.
All employees who fall below expected levels of performance either must take additional training, or go on probation until performance increases otherwise risk being let go. As some aggressive companies do, you could require employees to meet a weekly sales or service goal: $200 in personal sales or one positive customer review per week, for example. If these goals are not met they are shown the door.
The balancing act comes in when we realize that most of the methods available for assessing bad employees can, and frequently do, diagnose good employees as bad employees. An employee with a young, sick child might be unavoidably late for work three times in a row and be dismissed, despite his otherwise clean record and excellent personal service or sales figures.
A manager with a personal grudge against a good employee might write a scorching performance review that results in an unjustified firing. Few customers and a slow business day for a branch store can result in an otherwise excellent performer failing to meet a personal quota and being dismissed without hearing.
Events like these are far more common than we might think, and they can result in needlessly lost productivity due to replacing a worker, extra money spent on training, and a bad reputation for your company among your applicant pool. That is why some companies turn to employee assessment consultants to review their assessment procedures.
We need to balance rigorous assessment procedures with the ability to determine whether our assessments of an employee are in error. This can be done in a number of ways. Managers and HR personnel might be required to get approval from their immediate supervisors before a firing can be confirmed, allowing the employee a second chance and a fresh perspective for an evaluation.
"Three strikes" rulings can result in an employee being required to enter a training program or to suffer other penalties: reduced workplace powers for a probationary period, reduced benefits, no possibility of overtime, or even wage cuts. And sales goals and quotas can be used for incentive rather than punitive purposes: instead of firing employees who fail to meet sales goals, bonuses or promotions might be offered exclusively to employees who exceed them.
The idea of working through incentive rather than punitive measures may be worthy of consideration for your business in general. A punitive
business environment at best causes employees to think more in terms of
meeting minimum expectations than in terms of exceeding expectations. In
more serious cases, a punitive environment discourages employees from
taking potentially productivity-increasing risks, on the grounds that such risks might "get them in trouble". At worst, a punitive environment
actually turns good employees into bad ones by implicating them unfairly
in infractions with no possibility of appeal. Punitive-centric employee
assessments give you a powerful ability to ferret out bad employees, true, but is that power worth such a large hit to company morale?
Instead, it's often prudent--if finances permit it--to offer various
incentives for exceptional levels of production or customer service. If
an employee's excellent service wins your business a lifelong customer,
your potential earnings might easily outweigh the cost of providing that
employee an extra paid vacation day per year, or a small bonus to his or
her paycheck. You might also set up fast-track promotion systems for
employees who meet a certain standard of service, however it's assessed.
This ensures that your most dedicated, valuable employees will have a
strong motivation to continue producing, as well as ensuring that they
naturally move to positions of increased responsibility within the
company. If you can afford to provide these incentives, your company can
become more productive overall, your good employees become still better,
and even your bad employees, appropriately motivated, may see some reason
to mend their ways and start contributing to your business, rather than
draining it.
But as valuable as an incentive-based business environment can be--and
as unpleasant as firing employees usually is--it's important not to shirk
from firing if it's necessary. If assessment procedures are too rigorous, we end up firing good employees, true. But if they're too slack and forgiving, we end up retaining bad ones. As with the other balancing acts of business, only an individual business owner or policymaker can determine exactly how many chances an employee should get before being dismissed. But that determination must be made in order to prevent major losses in productivity, liability concerns, or a negative reputation for your business overall.
A business is, in a very real sense, only as good as its employees. And if you have bad employees, it's important to get rid of them as
efficiently as possible. But it's equally vital to make sure that in
seeking efficient systems of firing, you don't blind yourself to the costs that come with efficiency--and the potential advantages to be gained by taking a more tolerant, incentive-driven path.
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