Im sure that sounds a bit obvious…
We had to let someone go this week. It has been a long time coming and was
totally justified from a business standpoint.
Matter of fact it was over due and we probably let things drag on a lot
longer than we should have. That doesn’t
make it any easier.
As a manager and business owner you often have to do things
that you don’t like. It seems pretty
simple in theory. You have a set of
rules that the company operates by and if an employee fails to observe those
rules you give them a warning, then you give them a more severe warning and
then if it still continues you terminate the employment. In practice it’s a whole lot harder than
that. It’s not black and white.
In this case the employee was fired for repeatedly being
late or missing work altogether without reason.
It has gone on for months and we have had meetings and talks and while
it would get better for a time the employee never complied with the rules of
the company. It was to the point that it
was affecting the other employees and as employers we really didn’t have any
right to reprimand or say anything to the other employees given the attendance
of the other one.
As an example this employee has missed or been late 17 times
since the beginning of the year and we are only half way through March. When you have as few people as we do everyone
is important and everyone is critical to the production of our projects. Engineering is a very deadline based
business. We work on projects and if
those key people working on that project just go missing for a few days in the
middle, it can put the entire project and even the rest of the office in a tail
spin when we have to scramble to cover all of the deadlines and reallocate
people to make sure everything gets done.
None of this makes any difference it still is hard. This is a person and you know that firing
them has ramifications beyond just our company.
You start to think about what you are doing to them and their lives. This person has a family and kids. Will they be able to find another job? Will they be able to get insurance? Will they lose their house and their car? What makes it even worse is that since we are
a small business with 12 (now 11 employees) we are a family. I know these people and care about them and
it hurts to have to let one of them go.
In the end the only consolation that I can offer is that they brought
this on themselves and that we did everything we could to help them and avoid
this.
It still sucks.
