Letting Someone go for Cause During COVID

It’s incredibly difficult to write this article. The world feels like it is falling apart, and firing someone is already not fun. In fact, it can be downright dreadful. Given COVID-19, we are in the midst of a terrifying time to terminate an employee for cause. However, it is still part of running a company, and a big part of our job as leaders is to maintain the integrity of the business and the team. This is the uglier side of being a leader. 

Pandemic or not, a toxic or chronically underperforming employee is a massive dredge on company culture. 

Over the last few months, we have supported companies as they terminated employees for cause due to things like an 80% productivity decrease in the 8 months due to one bad actor, dramatically insubordinate behavior that crumbled company culture, or an employee who was underperforming and not in the right role to meet the needs of the team.

With this in mind, how we fire is just as important as how we hire. It is part of the company culture. The CEO is the Chief Culture Officer at the early-mid stages of a company. Giving this process serious thought will 1) create the values-aligned playbook for future managers, 2) enable us to do the hard thing as nicely as possible.

Remember, that firing someone feels terrible, but it typically leads to a sense of relief from the team, the manager, and even the employee.

Here are some best practices that we have found: 

• Spend an hour or two thinking about how you want to let this person go. These are hard conversations that demand our time and attention if we want them to go well.

• Get in touch with your lawyer, what needs to be buttoned up on the business side?

  • We will need a termination letter.

  • Can we afford a severance package? If so, how do we distribute this - final check today and severance later?

  • Do we want to keep this employee from talking about our company publicly for 30 days? 

• Write up an off-boarding document: What do we need to get back from this employee? What projects need to be wrapped up? 

• Schedule a 45 minute Zoom meeting with the employee

  • 30 minutes for the conversation, 15 minutes for gathering yourself and your thoughts after the fact.

• Schedule a meeting with their team (or the entire team, depending on company size) immediately following the termination conversation. 

  • Let the team know that this was due to cause, not the beginning of layoffs.

We know that this may not have been a fun read, but we also know that decisions like this need to be made. If there is one thing that we can leave you with: If you have to do something hard, do it with as much grace as you can muster.