Posted on November 21st, 2019
Find below a complete transcript of this video.
What’s up fellow entrepreneurs it’s John Fagerholm again. And today I wanted to talk about how to fire employees.
Now I know this is a topic that I’ve discussed in the past, but I still seem to get, questions about, how to do it, how to do it correctly. And the questions I get seem to be on the two extremes.
On one hand, people think this is because it’s an at-will employee state in California that they can fire for any reason.
On the other end, there are clients that say, well, even though the employee is misbehaving, I need to spend some time documenting their misbehavior before I fire them. So let me clear this up for you.
Yes, California is an at-will employment state, but you still can’t fire for any reason. There are several protected reasons that you can’t fire for, for example, age, race, sexual orientation, pregnancy.
There’s several on the other end, if it stopped for protective reasons, you can fire someone for, any reason or no reason. So why is there such confusion?
There’s such confusion because California makes it easy for employees to Sue. So even if you fire, even if you fire an employee for a legitimate reason, typically you, well not typically, but a lot of times you would get a demand letter from an attorney saying, give me all the records.
But basically they’re just fishing and looking for something to Sue you for. So here’s my, advice on what to do if you wanna fire an employee.
Obviously, if the employee has done something, that,, you know, you have to instantly fire for, for example, theft, some act of violence insubordination. I mean, anything like that, then I think you just fire.
If it’s someone that just isn’t a good employee and you want to fire them, then I could see why, as a business owner, you’d want to document it.
However, the mistake that employers make is that they start documenting and when they document, they give that evidence to the employee. For example, they’ll say, Hey, here’s a writeup for being late today.
Right? Or, and then when they consistently start getting things a write-ups, they, then are tipped off that they are likely gonna get fired soon.
So what happens then is they either file a workers’ comp claim or, uh, they complain about something else and that if you fire them, it becomes a retaliation claim.
So my advice is if it’s someone that that just clearly has done something wrong, fired them immediately. If it’s someone that you want to eventually get rid of, then I say document it, but I say document it within, the management or within HR.
So for example, just sending an email to HR saying, Hey, Henry’s late again, is, is also good evidence. Henry doesn’t have to have a document that, that he signs saying, yes, I was late a writeup or anything.
Of course you mentioned to Henry that he was late, uh, verbally, but then you document it with HR or management or whoever else. And what that does for you is once you do fire Henry, and then some lawyer comes back and says, well, you fired Henry because he’s Chinese.
You can say, no, look at all the times that Henry was late. We fired Henry because he can’t come to work on time, or he hasn’t been able to come to work on time.
And typically that will make the lawyer go away. If there aren’t any other problems. So anyway, that’s how you fire an employee in California.
Until next time fellow entrepreneurs are productive.
