One of my readers asked me to discuss how to “fire an employee.” Not because this particular reader needed to fire someone, but because he, himself, had been “fired.” The reality was that his company just ran out of work, but in practice, the implementation of his termination was handled so poorly as to create uncalled for emotional and financial damage.
As managers, terminating an employee is one of the most difficult tasks we face. Especially, those of us who are in charge of technology groups; dealing with people is not our strongest suite. So, let me offer sage advice, some of it learned the hard way but much of it gleaned from others whose mistakes I observed and from whom both you and I now benefit.
As a new manager of a technology group, your first statement may be, “I thought the Human Resources Department took care of all that.” No.
In my experience, I have not found the Human Resources (HR) department to be overly sensitive to the human side of life, either mine or the employee’s. I have, though, found HR to be annoyingly insulated from any direct responsibility and robotically wired to company procedures and legal safeguards. Nevertheless, somewhere along the line, read the company procedures or you will have them read to you. What the procedures say is only part of the problem. The bugaboo is implementation. And that is where I can help.
I do not intend for this to be a treatise on all personnel issues so I will pick and choose those that affect most technology organizations. I am not addressing union-controlled jobs. (Technologists are too unorthodox to join unions. They are not joiners or followers). I am not addressing technology positions under contract. I am addressing those technology jobs where you pay an employee for performance, assess that performance, and act accordingly.
First of all, remember that when you terminate an employee, for whatever reason, you are forcing a major change in the sea-state of that person’s life. The employee will be affected financially for weeks and months. He or she may be affected emotionally forever. You can mitigate and minimize both the financial and emotional aspects by taking the right steps. You cannot make them zero. Remember that. You cannot make them zero. There is a right way and there are many wrong ways to go about terminating an employee, but there are no ways that do not impact the lives of both you and the employee.
Now, for those people who are unaffected by the plight of human suffering and are just happy to be rid of the employee, for those people who enjoy firing people, this article is not for you. Neither is my company or any company I know. The situation I address is the legitimate need of a technology manager to terminate an employee.
There are two major classes of problems I plan to address:
- You have run out of work for this employee
- There are no other jobs available in the company because you are already long on people everywhere and the company is downsizing.
- There are no other jobs available in the company because the person you choose to terminate does not have the skills necessary for transfer to another job.
- You need to terminate for cause.
Let us start with the first scenario, the easiest (it’s all relative) for you, the manager. The company has simply run out of work and can no longer pay the employee. There are no other jobs in the company because you are downsizing and are already long on personnel. The question the employee will inevitably ask is, “Why did you pick me for termination?” usually adding, “Why didn’t you pick Susan or John? They don’t do half as much work as I do!” Expect considerable graphics.
Sometimes it is obvious why you picked Richard for termination. Richard paints the boxes and you have decided to not paint the boxes. The job no longer exists. There are no other jobs in the company because you already have every position filled to capacity. That makes it easier for you, the manager, because the reason is straightforward and the person you selected is obvious. It is never obvious, though, to the employee and, regardless, no amount of explanation makes it easy for the employee who is blindsided. So, what to do?
Step one is to care about the welfare of the employee and the emotional baggage you want that person to carry away from you and the company.
Step two is to read the company procedures.
Now if you are like 99.99% of the technology managers I have ever known or managed, you will discover at this point that you cannot go to step three because you just decided this morning to fire the employee and now discover that it is not reasonable, sometimes not even possible, to do so.
Oops. As a technology manager, you overlooked some things you must do.
Therefore, in order to fix the problem we have to go back six months and do what we should have done in the beginning. Of which, more later.