by Gary Crawshaw on August 27, 2010
PART 2
Silkin Management Group’s initial article on termination guidelines can be found at Silkin Management Group’s blog site which you can link to here: http://silkinmanagementgroup.org/?p=28
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In previous articles on this and other Silkin Management Group blog sites we went over how to handle a sequence of offenses committed by a staff member and what Silkin Management Group consultants recommend to Silkin Management Group clients on this matter. In this new series of articles we are going over key guidelines that consultants at Silkin Management Group go over with their clients when looking at terminating an employee. These guidelines can also be found in Silkin Management Group’s copyrighted Job Description and Office Policy Manual that all new Silkin Management Group clients receive.
The first two guidelines mentioned in Silkin Management Group’s August 25th article were: a) being aware if the employee was part of a protected group and b) making sure you had a good, defensible paper trail.
Here are several more termination guidelines or points to keep in mind that we go over with Silkin Management Group clients:
• Remaining Staff Morale: Make sure you look at what impact would failing to terminate have on morale as well as what impact terminating the employee would have on office morale. Silkin Management Group consultants look at this closely.
• Shooting From the Hip: Are you just trying to get rid of someone you don’t like or does the evidence justify dismissal? Silkin Management Group clients are taught to evaluate this.
As mentioned many times before in Silkin Management Group blog articles on this subject, make sure you have job descriptions and office policies in place as your first step of basic business management in the area of human resources. :
We will present more guidelines for termination decisions in upcoming Silkin Management Group blogs.
Gary Crawshaw
Silkin Management Group Consultant
Find out more about Silkin Management Group at http://silkinmanagementgroup.ning.com/.
by Bill Hickey on August 24, 2010
Part 4
Silkin Management Group’s blog articles on staff correction, parts 1 and 3 can be found on this site: http://silkinmanagementgroup.org/ while part 2 can be found on the Silkin Management Group blog site you are presently on.
The initial Silkin Management Group article discussed what to do on a first offense with a staff member, parts 2 and 3 went over what to do on second and third offenses. We emphasize again here, as we did in the earlier Silkin Management Group articles, the incredible importance of having proper office policies and job descriptions in place in order to properly deal with staff. You can easily put yourself in a legal quagmire if you attempt to discipline staff without these in place.
As mentioned in the earlier Silkin Management Group blogs, new Silkin Management Group clients infrequently have proper job descriptions and office policies in place. Therefore Silkin Management Group clients are provided with Silkin Management Group’s 400 plus page manual of office policies and job descriptions for each position in the office as part of their Silkin Management Group program.
What do you do with a staff member that you have corrected three times? You’ve already given them a written warning, discussed that continued violations could result in suspension or dismissal and you find them doing it again. At this point Silkin Management Group recommends to Silkin Management Group clients to check their production record (although you should have done that already as part of correcting earlier violations). Silkin Management Group institutes with all new Silkin Management Group clients simple statistical methods to keep track of key production metrics for each staff member and the office as a whole.
If the person is a high producer (which is unlikely given that they keep messing up), then you might consider the next step to be a suspension without pay for a certain number of days. If the person has a poor production record, dismissal may be in order. There are some key guidelines Silkin Management Group consultants go over with Silkin Management Group clients to take into account when making the decision to terminate, and we will discuss them in our next Silkin Management Group blog.
Bill Hickey
Silkin Management Group Consultant
You can follow Silkin Management Group at http://twitter.com/silkin
