Employee Dismissal - How Employers Can Protect Themselves

Employee Dismissal

When you consider an employee dismissal, you will often have fear the employee dismissal will go badly and you’ll end up in court. In my experience, you have nothing to fear, if you terminate correctly. For more on this, click employee dismissal procedure.

On this web page, you’ll find out the legal reasons for terminating an unproductive and underperforming worker. Let me give you 3 circumstances when employee dismissal is perfectly legal.

The first circumstance is terminating for gross misconduct. Examples of gross misconduct are sabotage, major theft, destroying company records and creating an intimidating work environment. In the case of gross misconduct, you should investigate any allegations thoroughly before terminating. If you don’t, you may risk a wrongful dismissal charge because the worker will surely claim the he was not given “due process.”

The second circumstance is terminating for terrible performance. Some examples include making mistakes, not performing per job requirements, and lack of skills. To fire, you must write-up the occasions of poor performance and give the member of the staff plenty chances to get better.

The third circumstance is terminating for repeated minor misconduct. Here are examples of minor misconduct: breaking minor work rules, excessive use of email for personal reasons and sleeping on the job. You should document the misconduct transgressions. Then, give verbal and written warning. Finally, you issue your final written warning. After that, you can terminate the problem worker. This will keep you out of the courthouse.

Here’s summary of this article. You can dismiss an employee for the following three reasons... gross misconduct, bad performance and repeated minor misconduct. These are all legitimate reasons for termination and any court will uphold your termination.

There is one exception to this.

Although you may be firing for a legal reason, you must use correct termination procedures. If you don’t, you may still find yourself in court.

There is an excellent resource you should get to help you with a termination. It’s called the Employee Termination Guidebook. It’ll show you how to terminate a worker properly. You can learn more about it here.

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