Employee Discharge

Maris

I work for a non-profit organization that has never had an HR department until 6 months ago. It is a very "family"-oriented place and people who have been here forover 25 years say they can't remeber anyone ever being fired.

We recently had to let a receptionist go for poor performance. Although she received a "good" evaluation in December, her performance was less than desirable and increasingly declining. She was warned, coached, encouraged and finally terminated 4 months later. Most verbal and written efforts to correct her behavior is documented in her file.

My concerns lie in 2 areas:
1. She is the first person to be terminated in over 20 years and the first person to have any kind of documentation in her file.

2. She is a member of a protected class.

While we know we fired her for cause and it is documented, the fact that supervisors have not ever documented other employees' issues/concerns makes me think that we have been set up to look like we "railroaded" this person.
How can we show this is not the case and that we simply started to do what needs to be done as far as documentation goes? We have to start somewhere, don't we?

WOCO Frank

>
>How can we show . . . that we simply started to do
>what needs to be done as far as documentation goes? We have to start
>somewhere, don't we?


Sometimes the best evidence of that is whether or not you continue with proper counseling, documentation, etc. on your other employees after this one has gone.
If I were an EEOC investigator, and I came in to audit you, that's one of the first things I'm going to look for. But if you term'd your receptionist, then in the next year didn't document anyone else's performance problems, you'd be in trouble.

The EEOC doesn't want to hear that your other employees are all top-notch, either - even if they are.

Rockie

One thing the EEOC would look at very closely is the fact that she received a good evaluation in December. You will have to show very good, very clear documentation of how her performance declined during this period of time and the documentation of the counseling and coaching efforts. It's really difficult to rate a person "good" and then discharge them a few months later. If your documentation is good, you will have no problems; otherwise, it could look like you were targeting this person. Sometimes you have to play the devil's advocate and try to look at things the way the EEOC would look at it.

I do this a lot of times with my supevisors when they want to let someone go. I play the part of the EEOC and they try to defend their actions. It's amazing when they realize they can't defend or support their actions. I tell them it wouldn't get any easier in the court situation.

Margaret Morford

You might also think about having training classes for managers for two reasons. First, so that you can make the case if you were ever audited that with the firing of the receptionist, your company realized that it wasn't doing a good job documenting performance problems. You decided to hold training sessions for the managers to make sure the documentation and counseling would be done consistently in the future. To your point, you've got to start somewhere. I also agree with the person above. You can't start and stop. It will create legal problems, but more important your organization can't function if people are not performing. The second reason to do this is that many managers don't address performance problems because they don't know how. You need to give them the tools that make them comfortable addressing something that makes all managers uncomfortable. Also, it will send a clear message to the managers that the company expects them to address performance problems. It's part of their jobs as managers. You should also sit down and talk to the manager about this December performance review and make him/her understand that he/she made the company's position difficult because he/she was not honest in the December review about the receptionist's performance problems.

If you don't know where to go for a training class like the one I described, my company has one an excellent "how-to" one called "Corrective Action - Disciplining without Destroying." I'll be glad to discuss it with you if you like. Please feel free to call me.

Margaret Morford
theHRedge
615-371-8200
[email]mmorford@mleesmith.com[/email]
[url]http://www.thehredge.net[/url]