What to Do When Considering Termination

What to Do When Considering Termination

Employee terminations are no fun for anyone—certainly for the person getting fired, but also for the person doing the firing. Aside from the inevitability of a uncomfortable conversation (which never really gets easier), every decision to terminate an employee increases an employer’s risk of dealing with a wrongful termination claim.

Compli may not be able to help you avoid the difficulty of terminations all together, but we can give you the tools you reduce your legal liability, and perhaps even make those awkward conversations a little easier for managers and (soon to be ex-) employees alike. Here on the blog, we’re sharing a few recommended practices for dealing with employee terminations in a systematic approach. We started with steps to take before there’s an issue—today, let’s review what to do when considering termination:

Document the Reason for Termination

As with so many components of your workforce compliance program, your termination procedures should align with the contents of your organization’s employee handbook. That means that when letting someone go due to breach of company policy, a manager needs to make sure to name the policy that was violated. Was it due to harassment? Attendance issues? Theft? Whatever the issue, it should be connected to a specific workplace policy.

The manager should also provide proof of attestation that employee understood what was expected (i.e. that the employee knew the rule they were breaking), and provide documentation describing how the employee violated that policy. The more detailed and specific your notes, the better equipped your organization will be in the event of a legal dispute.

Finally, managers should make sure to include any prior documentation of disciplinary notices given to the employee.

Verify the Legal Purpose for the Termination

Although most employees are employed on an at-will basis, meaning they can be terminated at the employer’s discretion, there are a few unlawful reasons to fire someone. You can’t terminate an employee over one of that individual’s protected characteristics, nor can the decision to terminate constitute retaliation.

Let’s break these down:

An employee’s protected characteristics include their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, gender, age, genetic information, and disability status. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (and other federal and state regulators) consider it an an act of discrimination to terminate an employee for one or more of these characteristics.

Retaliation occurs when an employer takes adverse action against an employee engaging in protected activity, such as filing an EEO charge, alleging workplace harassment, or asking for a disability accommodation. In other words, you can’t fire someone for seeking to assert their legal rights.

 

In our next article in this series, we’ll dive into those interactions so many people would rather avoid, and explore the right ways and wrong ways to conduct a termination meeting. But if you have a difficult conversation coming up before then, we can help:  Learn all about Compli’s termination initiatives and manager training solutions.

Toby Graham

Toby manages the marketing communications team here at Compli. She's on a quest to help people tell clear, fun stories that their audience can relate to. She's a HUGE sugar junkie...and usually starts wandering the halls looking for cookies around 3pm daily.

→ Toby Graham

Related Posts




Phone: 866.356.1735
Support: 877.522.4276
Menu
Customer Login

Send this to friend