Posted on September 19th, 2019
Below is a complete transcript of this video.
What’s happening fellow entrepreneurs is John Fagerholm again and today I want to do another video that isn’t law specific but has legal ramifications.
I get a lot of questions related to what do you do about employees that don’t get along with each other. I’ve had the same, I’ve had employees that don’t get along and luckily it’s worked out, but there are potential legal ramifications if you fire one over the other or something to that effect.
I had a client and they had a terrible employee. I mean she was just… She would pretend that she couldn’t hear whenever it was someone she didn’t want talking to her to speak to her.
She played her music loudly. Even when they asked her not to, she would use vulgar language and at some point, she wasn’t getting along with the supervisors.
They elected to terminate her. Then of course she sued and said that it was retaliation because she had complained about the supervisor.
For me, I think, or in my opinion, I think the best thing is tracking. Always track. Even if you’re not specifically letting the employee know that they’re doing something specifically wrong, at least track it.
The reason why… Now I know it seems like it doesn’t make sense. Why wouldn’t you tell the employee that they’re doing something wrong?
But if this is a bad employee and you know that you’re going to terminate them, some companies will give write-ups and have them sign it and do that, and that’s one way to do it.
However, a lot of times if the employee knows that they’re going to get fired, then suddenly they claim an injury.
Now you can’t fire them according to worker’s comp law without having a retaliation claim or they’ll come and complain about something.
Then if you fired them for the wrongdoing later, then they say it was retaliation for this. It ends up becoming a big lawsuit. But anyway, back to my original thought, which is what do you do about employees that don’t get along?
My perspective on employees, it’s kind of like the 80/20 rule, right?
Which almost applies to everything in life, right? 20% of what you do is 80% of your results, 20% of the employees are 80% of your problems. Anyway, so I say it a little bit different. I have the 80/10/10 rule.
There’s 10% of your employees that are just excellent and there’s 10% of your employees that are typically the bad employees and then 80% of them are just kind of filling space, do a good job, but aren’t necessarily a problem or aren’t necessary excellent.
So the question then becomes, what do you do with that 10% that’s a problem. They’re the ones that usually don’t get along with each other.
I think that unless there’s a very specific problem like this person hit this person or something like that, I think it’s all just documenting until you can start cutting those employees away.
I also think that if you know you’re going to fire an employee, I think a severance agreement is the best way to go.
Now of course if they’ve done something specifically wrong that you can fire them for like stealing, maybe you don’t give a severance agreement.
However, if you’re thinking, okay, this person just doesn’t work out, doesn’t fit the culture, whatever it is, then I think a severance agreement works because a two weeks pay with severance and then a release of all claims is better than the cost of what a potential lawsuit would be.
That’s just my opinion on that. If if two employees don’t get along with each other, there really isn’t a specific legal answer to that.
It’s just you’ve got to use your business acumen, you’ve got to figure out how to get rid of whichever employee that you want to get rid of.
Then cover all your bases so that there isn’t a lawsuit. However, sometimes you may not necessarily need to get rid of two employees.
Maybe it’s just as simple as making sure they’re not interacting with each other. I don’t know. I know you guys aren’t babysitters, you’re productive entrepreneurs, but sometimes babysitting is what it takes.
All right, so until next time fellow entrepreneurs be productive. Bye.
