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How To Fire An Employee
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Article 7: Handling The Guilt
No matter how gentle and considerate you were, you may feel guilty or even sick after firing someone, especially the first time.
As a small-business owner, you probably worked closely with the ex-employee. You know she has kids to support, or he just bought a new house. How is the ex-employee going to make it without this paycheck?
Feeling remorse is common. Can you fire the employee without feeling guilty? It may get easier over time, or if the misconduct was especially egregious, but generally you will suffer also after firing someone. It’s part of being human.
“People put such emotion into their jobs that I don’t know that there is a least painful way to do it,” says Ron Miller, a senior attorney in labor and employment law at Chicago-area legal publisher CCH.
It helps, though, knowing that the employee had several written warnings and time to rectify the situation. Given those warnings, ultimately the person brought it upon himself.
Try not to empathize with the discharged employee. Focus instead on your other employees. Their performance or attitudes have in some measure been affected by the troublesome employee as well.
Experienced employers like Tessa Barrientos, who owns a Curves franchise in Dallas, learn to shield their own emotions by focusing on business imperatives.
“When nothing is changing,” she says, “there’s a point where you have to think of the business.”
Regret aside, your biggest practical concern once the problem employee is gone is whether he will sue the company. If you’ve been careful to document the problem all along, if you’ve disciplined him like other employees, if you haven’t discriminated, you probably have no worries.
Knowledge of federal and state laws is your biggest safeguard.
“You may not be in business to be an attorney or human resources specialist, but you have responsibility in those areas,” says Gene Fairbrother, ShopTalk consultant for the National Association for the Self-Employed (NASE). “You need a basic understanding of them or you could pay the price. You are president of your own company, so act like it.”
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How To Fire An Employee
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