Letting someone go

Dave Gray, the CEO of XPLANE, posts some thoughts on "The hardest thing a manager ever has to do," letting an employee go. He lists a number of questions --both explicit and implicit-- that will need to be answered. He also lists five basic rules for dealing with difficult situations:

• Don't sugar-coat the truth.
• Don't make promises you won't be able to deliver on.
• Admit fault if it's appropriate.
• Don't blame your boss or upper management.
• Don't overexplain.
• Do it quickly.

link Categories: Termination

Progressive Discipline -- A Mini-Guide for Supervisors

This was handed out at an H.R. conference I attended. I’m not sure of the original source.

Discipline or discharge of any employee must be for just cause. Simply put, discipline has to be fair. Before you discipline an employee, always ask yourself the following:

1. Is this a disciplinary event?

• Ask the employee for an explanation. Take notes.
• Determine whether the conduct is:
• Innocent (did he know he was doing something wrong?)
• Blameworthy

2. If it’s blameworthy, how will we prove it occurred?

• Any witnesses? (take statements)
• Any physical evidence? (keep samples of bad products, pictures, etc.)

3. What is the appropriate amount of discipline?

• Be firm but fair and consider the following:
• Past record. What sort of employee is this?
• Treatment of others who have done the same thing before. His this behaviour been accepted in the past and if so, has it been made clear that it no longer will be?
• Provocation. Was the employee provoked?
• Premeditation and intent. Was his action planned? Did the employee misunderstand the instruction?
• Admission of guilt. Did the employee admit to being wrong and apologize?
• Seriousness of the offence. What effect will this have on the company and/or other employees?
• Rehabilitative Potential. Will this employee benefit by being given another chance?
• Penalty. Does the collective agreement specify a penalty or course of action?
• Company rules. Has any company rule clearly been broken?

Categories: Progressive-Discipline, Termination Recruiting.com linkfest

Testing

Test post from ecto.

[composed and posted with ecto]

I'm here, really!

Back around the beginning of July I started having some problems with access to my web-site and server. Tech. support at the hosting company told me that me traffic was getting such that the shared server was having trouble keeping up. Now, lest you think I have amazing visitor stats., a look at the server logs showed that much of the traffic was coming from unauthorized direct-links to images on my server (several thousand hits per day). The hosting company's solution? upgrade to a dedicate server at a significant monthly fee. I wasn't ready for that. My solution? I would block the links to the image files and clean up the files on the server. I have 2 gigs of storage space on the server and it's easy to get careless with file maintenance. As well, I was running three blogs on the same server. If I split at least one out to its own hosting service, that would relieve some load. I put in the image block, cleaned out the old files and moved my recipe log to its own address and host. The access problem seemed to have cleared up, so I thought I would leave the old recipe blog in place for a while, until readers found the new address. That was a mistake. Much of the server traffic came from those files and it wasn't long before the issues came back. The next step was to get radical. Back up the blog databases, wipe the server files clean and rebuild from scratch. I found out, too late, that wipe the files should be step three. After, "check to make sure the back up file is okay". It was corrupted and I lost everything. So here I am, three or four weeks later and I have managed to recover much from search-engine and feed-reader caches. It's been a lot of manual re-posting, but I'm back on track. H.R. eSources is now being powered by Blogger. I've lost a few of the scripting features available in WordPress, but I think I can live without them. Blogger doesn't support category posting, but I've cobbled together a bit of a work-around using del.icio.us. My apologies to those who have been supportive of my efforts here. This has likely created some dead links at your sites. If you were subscribing via a feed reader, that address is likely invalid. This is the new feed address >>http://www.ismckenzie.com/hresources/atom.xml. Thank you for your patience.