When we want to fire someone, should we wait until we can build a “paper file”?
How To Survive an Employee Lawsuit: 10 Tips for Success
With lawsuits against employers becoming ever more common—and jury verdicts skyrocketing—your risk of getting sued has increased dramatically even if you’ve done all the right things. Learn how to protect yourself with our free White Paper, How To Survive an Employee Lawsuit: 10 Tips for Success.
Here’s what you had to say:
- You’d like to have a paper file, but you don’t want to “build” one. If there have never been any additions to an employee’s file, and then, suddenly, there’s a flurry of negative paperwork, that looks like you’re out to get the employee and juries don’t like that. Furthermore, if you heavily document one employee, but don’t document other employees who do similar things, you’re singling out that employee. — S.S.
- Of course, we should never be in the position where we want to fire someone and there’s no documentation to back up the action. But we do get there sometimes, and we have to figure out what to do. Delaying the action is a problem for several reasons. For example, other employees will wonder why the organization isn’t taking action against someone who deserves to be fired. As time goes by, it will seem more and more as though the organization condones the behavior that is leading it to want to fire the individual. The employee’s attorney will say, “This was an offense so serious that you would fire someone for it, yet you let my client do it for eight months?” — W.G..
- Technically, if the employee is at will, you don’t need paperwork to fire them—you can fire for any reason or no reason. However, the threat of a suit is always lurking when you terminate, and if you have no paperwork, you’ll have trouble defending yourselves against the suit. For example, if the person says, “You fired me because I am too old,” or because “I am a member of a certain racial or religious group,” what will you say in defense? — R.A.