Terminating Employees
Easing the Burden of Firing Employees
By Ellen Thompson
Oct 13, 2006, 10:50

My husband and I lived for four years in the Oak Hill condominium complex located in Penn Valley, PA, a suburb of Philadelphia. It’s the kind of place where you can leave your door unlocked and nothing will happen. We know this for a fact – our sliding glass doors were unlocked pretty much the entire time we lived there.

As you might imagine, I was surprised when I received a call earlier this week from a friend who told me to turn on the evening news. An employee of the complex, who also maintained his residence there, was recently fired and had been given two weeks to vacate his apartment. Apparently, the former employee hadn’t gotten out, and so the property manager was evicting him. The ex-employee responded by entering the property management office with a shot gun and holding the property manager hostage for four hours. Fortunately, there was a happy ending – the property manager was let go and the man turned himself in.

Firing an employee is the worst part of any manager’s job. Sometimes, you get lucky. The employee makes it easy on you and goes quietly. Other times, it can get quite ugly, as it did in the extreme case at Oak Hill.

Unfortunately, I have a lot of experience firing people. Early in my career, I had a tendency to take risks when hiring people and this led to a large number of unfortunate hiring decisions. In many cases, the mistakes I had made were so obvious that letting go of mismatched employees was a relief to everyone involved, including the employee being fired.

I’ve been lucky in that I’ve only had one somewhat nasty firing experience. In the late 1990s, I hired a programmer and almost immediately knew it was a bad fit. It was soon obvious to everyone that this wasn’t going to work out – everyone except the programmer. So I did what I had to do. I fired him. Later that night, I got a number of calls from him begging for his job. In the background, I could hear his wife screaming, threatening to divorce him.

I think it has been relatively easy for me to let people go because I have always been clear and reasonable about what I expect and what I will not tolerate (e.g. dishonesty of any sort). I always address employment issues early, head on and allow ample time for an employee to remedy his deficiencies. In a nutshell, by the time I need to let someone go, he can see it coming.

Once you get to the point where you need to fire someone, there isn’t much you can do to mitigate the damages except to let the person go in a way that lets him retain as much dignity as possible. Generally, this means you fire him quickly and privately.

Unfortunately, there is only so much dignity you can afford to preserve in the Internet age. After all, it’s hard to make someone feel good while you’re cutting off his email account, watching him clean out his desk and then escorting him out before he can say goodbye to workforce friends. The reality is there are too many ways for a disgruntled employee with access to your email or computer network to inflict major damage on your business. In most cases, you really have no choice but to put the goal of protecting company assets ahead of the needs of the former employee.

Ultimately, the best way to minimize the damage and disruption caused when you need to fire an employee is to avoid the need to let people go in the first place. You can move towards this goal by strengthening your fundamental HR practices. First, write an accurate and complete job description for every position you hire. Source a wide applicant pool and recruit someone who is highly qualified to perform that job. Then, manage him carefully so he’ll meet your expectations, or know exactly what to expect if he doesn’t.


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