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File this under posts I wish I’d written. Yesterday, the Harvard Business Review published A Step-by-Step Guide to Firing Someone.
Firing an employee is the most difficult job any business owner, executive, manager, or HR person has to do. I’ve been there. It absolutely sucks. (And it absolutely sucks even more when the fired employee breaks down and starts crying). HBR synthesizes the process in three essentials tips to handle the decision, and five (not-so-easy) steps for the termination itself.
My earliest cinematic memories involve Star Wars.
Two and a half years ago I asked, How much does it cost to defend an employment lawsuit? My answer:
The reality is that defending a discrimination or other employment lawsuit is expensive. Defending a case through discovery and a ruling on a motion for summary judgment can cost an employer between $75,000 and $125,000.
Oh, how I love to be right.
True confession time. I watch The Voice. It’s not like it’s at the top of my DVR, but, my remote always seem to stop on NBC between 8 and 10 on Monday and Tuesday nights. (My pick to win this season: Amy Vachal). So, when I heard that Team Shelton and Team Gwen had formed one team outside of work, I thought, “What a great opportunity to write a blog post on office romances.” (This is how the mind of blogger works).
What can do wrong with office romances? As it turns out, a lot. So, in the spirit of The Voice, here’s 10 reasons co-workers shouldn’t turn their chairs for each other.
By Mike Wise
Today, we are going to try something new — a guest post. Readers, meet Mike Wise. Mike will be joining us for a three-part series over the next three months to share his thoughts on the social business and human resources. Today is Part 1: Online Reputation Management in the Context of HR.
When you receive a phone call from a company looking for information on a former employee that was a less than stellar employee, or worse, fired, do you?
(a) Ignore it.
(b) Confirm only the fact of prior employment and dates.
(c) Give a truthful, negative reference.
Most employers do either “a” or “b”, while very few opt for “c”. Many employers avoid “c” because they fear liability if the ex-employee loses a job because of a negative reference. Yet, in Ohio and elsewhere, there is nothing illegal about providing truthful, negative information.
Bob is such a NASTY MOTHER FUCKER don’t know how to talk to people!!!!!! Fuck his mother and his entire fucking family!!!! What a LOSER!!!!
[W]hile distasteful, the Respondent tolerated the widespread use of profanity in the workplace, including the words “fuck” and “motherfucker.” Considered in this setting, Perez’ use of those words in his Facebook post would not cause him to lose the protection of the Act.
The language Perez chose to post was not merely obscenity used as curse words or name-calling. The phrases NASTY MOTHER F—er and F—ck his mother and his entire f—ing family are qualitatively different from the use of obscenity that the Respondent appears to have tolerated in this workplace. Perez’ statements were both epithets directed at McSweeney and a slur against his family that also constituted a vicious attack on them.What are the takeaways for employers?
We’ve had a robust February of snow in Northeast Ohio, which provided the first excuse of the season to pull my snowblower out of the garage. Since we moved into our house a decade ago, there was not a snow storm that it couldn’t handle. The Sunday newspaper, however, is another story.
Two years ago, we cancelled our Plain Dealer subscription. As working parents of two young kids, reading the paper took a back seat to, well, life in general. The fine folks at the Plain Dealer, however, do not appear to believe us. Each Sunday morning, we awaken to find a four-page “promotional” edition of the paper in the driveway. No amount of phone calls have stopped the annoyance of this weekly driveway spam.
Last Sunday, I awoke to six inches of snow. Perhaps it was because the paper was buried under the blanket of white, or because it didn’t register as a fact important enough to recall, but I did not give the four pages of promo-news a second thought as I pushed the snowblower down my drive. More accurately, I didn’t give it a second thought until I saw a few scraps of paper fly from the chute, followed quickly by the smell of smoke and the abrupt sound of the blades seizing.
“F***ing newspaper,” I yelled!
My wife and I tried, without avail, to dislodge the wet mess of newspaper that had quickly hardened to concrete around and behind the impeller. Knowing that disassembling a piece of heavy machinery is well beyond my pay grade, my wife Googled how to unblock a jammed snowblower. What she read stopped us in our tracks. Apparently, even though the engine is off, and blades blocked, there is a fair amount of tension left in the belt, which would cause the blades to spin when the jam is freed. Since we like having all 10 of our fingers pristinely attached to their respective hands, I pushed the lifeless snowblower back into the garage, and we grabbed our shovels for a long week of pushing and lifting snow.
“What,” you are saying to yourselves, “does this story have to do with employee terminations?”
When you terminate an employee, you cannot act on impulse. When the snowblower jammed, my first impulse was to do everything possible to unjam it. The joy of my success, however, would have been severely tempered by a hospital trip to reattach my finger(s). The same holds true when you terminate an employee. Without exception, you cannot act out of anger or impulse. Your decisions must be well researched and deliberate. Review the personnel file. Talk to managers and supervisors. Read relevant policies. Research how similar employees have been treated in similar situations. And, if you have any doubt, call your employment lawyer. More often than not, impulse leads to lawsuits.
I’ll leave it to you to decide—between a lawsuit or lost finger—which is the more painful.
An old maxim warns: Be careful what you wish for; you might receive it. In the Sixth Circuit, however, employees need not be careful what they ask for because, if their request is granted and they encounter buyer’s regret, they can sue.No termination is perfectly insured against a lawsuit. Some are more high risk than others (and those should be accompanied by an offer a severance package in exchange for a release of claims). Even the easiest decisions, however, carry some amount of risk. On any given day, any judge or jury could agree with the employee and decide against you. You job as an employer is to balance the risk of a lawsuit against the risk of keeping an employee employed and make a reasoned, informed decision about whether to retain, fire, or fire with a severance offer. And, please, don’t have buyer’s regret.
Have you ever refused to eat at fast food sandwich because the pickles were off? Not “off” as in omitted, or “off” as in taste, but “off” as in alignment, or, these pickles are arranged in a triangle and not in a square on my patty?
If you answered “yes”to this question, you’re lying, because no one in the history of the world has ever said or thought that their McPickles are mis-aligned.
Ask yourself, then, why an employer would try to justify an employee’s discipline on the grounds of “poor pickle placement.”
Last week I discussed EYM King of Michigan, in which an NLRB Administrative Law Judge invalided a fast-food restaurant’s no-loitering policy. In that same case, the same ALJ also considered the suspension and termination of an employee who worked part-time for a labor union and had previously struck other local fast food establishments over raising the minimum wage. On September 20, 2013, that employee, Claudette Wilson, was sent home early without pay for “not placing pickles on sandwiches in a perfect square as she was supposed to.” The day prior, she had met with a co-worker in the parking lot to fill out a union questionnaire on wages, for which she received a written warning for violating the no-loitering policy.
The ALJ concluded that the employer’s suspension of Wilson discriminated against her for engaging in protected union activity:
Wilson admits that she did not put pickles on her sandwiches in perfect squares as she was supposed to, due to her anger over the written warning she received. However, given Respondent’s animus towards her protected activity, as evidence by the illegal warning given toher the same day, I find that the General Counsel has made a prima facie that her discipline (being sent home early) was related to Wilson engaging in protected activity in Respondent’s parking lot the day prior.
Folks, no one in their right mind is going to believe that a fast-food worker suffered discipline for poor pickle placement. Your personnel decisions must pass the red-face test. Can you consider the decision without repelling in embarrassment? If not, it’s best to pass on the decision and live to fight another day. If you react poorly to your own decision, imagine how a judge or jury will react.
Those of you who’ve been reading for awhile know that my 8-year-old daughter plays in a rock band. “Band” might be too ambitious of a term. She’s taken guitar lessons at School of Rock, in Strongsville, Ohio, for a couple of years, and since January has taken part in its performance program, which is known as Rock 101 for the beginner musicians. For her first set of performances in January, she was the only student, leaving her to play guitar and sing on every song. That pattern continued for her next set of shows in May, as the band added a drummer, but no singers.
Norah performed her most recent shows over the past two Saturdays. This time, even though she was joined by two other singers, she still sang lead on three of the songs (while still playing guitar), and added a new instrument, bass, on the fourth. Needless to say, she killed it (again):
So you don’t think I’m just a shill for my daughter, here are four talent-management lessons to take away from my rock star:
1. Let employees be who they are. “Cutetallica” was born out of the show director telling Norah that she sounds too cute when she sings For Whom the Bell Tolls, which, after all, is about death and the Grim Reaper. Her guitar teacher, on the other hand, liked Norah’s cute-sounding version of the song. Hence, Cutetallica. Your employees are who they are. If you want their best, don’t try to force a round peg into a square hole. Instead, let them perform while being true to themselves and their talents.
2. Push your employees. School of Rock gets it. It knows how to push kids to their limits, and recognizes that, much more often than not, talent rises to the occasion. Let your employees rise and fall to their abilities. Push them hard, and take away the safety net. They’ll surprise and delight you.
3. Age has no role in the workplace. Don’t rely on age (young or old) as a factor in your employment or staffing decisions. If School of Rock limited Norah’s ceiling by her 8-year-old age, she’d still be playing one instrument, and would stay in Rock 101 for a few more years. Instead, they allow her to take off the training wheels and succeed by her ability, not the perception of her ability based on how many years she’s been alive.
4. Talent is not a substitute for hard work. What impresses me most about how well Norah performs isn’t the performance, but all of the time and effort she puts in to honing it. Yes, I can be the nagging parent (“Did you practice your guitar today?”), but she’s the one putting in the time in her bedroom, making sure she’s going to nail her solo in About A Girl, and guaranteeing that she won’t forget any lyrics in the second verse of For Whom the Bell Tolls. Talent can sometimes leave you in the lurch, but hard work never will.
This was Norah’s last Rock 101 performance. She’s graduated to playing with the older, more experienced kids. Four months from now, I’ll be back to entertain you with the music of Joan Jett, as strummed and sung by Norah Hyman, maybe with an HR or employment law lesson to teach along the way.
If you’re in the area, Cutetallica has one show left, this Sunday, September 21, at 4 pm, at the Strongsville Chalet, 16200 Valley Pkwy, Strongsville, Ohio, as part of the Arts in Strongsville “Day at the Chalet.”
We live in a surveilled world. There are an estimated 30 million closed-circuit surveillance cameras in the United States. There are an additional 190 million cell phones with cameras. These numbers don’t account for drones in the sky and other modes of video recording. In total, there exists the potential of 220 million recording eyes watching you at all times.
It is a brave new world of workplace investigations. He-said/she-said has been replaced by “let’s go to the tape.” If you are not considering the possibility (probability?) of an alleged incident between employees having been recorded somehow, by someone or something, you cannot and should not consider your investigation complete. There is no doubt that we have sacrificed a lot of personal privacy in the name of personal security. Employers should be using this to their advantage to leave no stone unturned in uncovering the truth about allegations of harassment and other misconduct.
[Photo by Hustvedt (Own work) [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons]Last Thursday night, I took my daughter to see the Old 97’s. By way of backstory, Norah performed an Old 97’s song, The New Kid, during her first concert for School of Rock back in January. I tweeted the link to the video to the band’s lead singer, Rhett Miller, who was kind enough (and cool enough) to tweet back, as was the band, who called Norah “badass.” The band was also nice enough to share the video on their Facebook page.
Thanks to a kind gesture from a good friend, Norah and I got to go backstage before the show to meet Rhett. He remembered Norah’s performance from YouTube, they talked about school and his 8-year-old daughter, he told her to call him when she gets her first paying gig, and he posed for some pictures.
The downside of going backstage before a SRO show, however, is that we lost our front-of-stage spot. The upside of going to a concert with an 8-year-old is that she can wiggle her way back through the crowd, and I get to say, “Excuse me, I can’t lose my kid.” Norah found her way back to the front of the stage, right in front of guitarist Ken Bethea, and managed to sit on the stage for the entire concert.
Being that close, I could see the setlist taped to the stage. It certainly appeared to me that the band changed their set mid-show to add The New Kid. Before the song, Rhett talked about Norah and her YouTube video, and called her “a cool kid”. And all these people around us start saying to Norah, “Oh my god! You’re the girl from YouTube. You rock!” Knowing her, I’m surprised she didn’t stand up and take a bow.
During Big Brown Eyes, Rhett appeared to look right a Norah, and, with a big smile, sang the line, “You made a big impression for a girl of your size.”
Rhett name checked Norah again while apologizing to her for the swearing during the show (sorry, video NSFW).
At the end of the show, Rhett walked up to Norah and said, “Norah, this is for you,” and handed her his pick. She was beaming.
It was a magical night for Norah, and I am so happy I got to share it with her. BTW, the band is great live, and if they are in your area, this summer or any other time, you should definitely check them out.
Employers, here’s your homework assignment. Create some magic for your employees. Rhett could have said no when someone asked if we could come backstage, but he didn’t. He didn’t have to change their setlist to add a song, but he did. In fact, he didn’t have to do anything to make Norah feel special, but he did—more than most in his situation would have—and he nurtured a fan for life.
You can (and should) do the same for your employees. And you don’t need big, expensive gestures. The small things count. Here are a few ideas to engage your employees, demonstrate your appreciation of them, and keep them content and engaged:
