Turnover is hard – and expensive. Even though we’re in the midst of a revolving door of exiting employees, it’s hard to consider intentionally letting someone go. However, an employee who isn’t carrying their weight and leaving colleagues to pick up the slack could cause the loss of good employees. It can be challenging to terminate an employee, but sometimes there simply is no room for improvement because performance or behavior is poor, therefore replacing an employee is the optimal way to mitigate risk.
With the Truvelop app, managers have an HR repository to store all comments, documents, and plans regarding individual team members.
However, every data point and comment captured within Truvelop including KPI’s, summary comments, and attachments should be treated as legal documents that are in line with principles of fairness and equality as well as current employment laws.
Determining whether or not an employee is capable of improvement or if there is an opportunity for the employee to perform better in a different role are important steps to take prior to making the decision to ultimately terminate.
Regularly scheduled evaluation will help you memorialize what your team member is doing well and not doing so well. Comments will help you document the team member behaviors and actions that resulted in their score, which could be important to reference at a later date. The more evidence you provide for a score, the more accurate and objective it is going to be.
With Truvelop, you can also Evaluate or Spark, based on an incident. If you see a team member doing something dangerous, exceptionally wrong, or blatantly inappropriate, note it immediately and schedule time to meet with the employee to discuss it.
Often underperforming employees aren’t aware that their performance, attitude or behavior is standing in the way of them being successful. It is the manager’s responsibility to help team members be successful, removing obstacles, motivating, educating, and inspiring team members and teams. It is important to clearly communicate with employees what is expected from them and what improvements need to be made—and by when.
Failing – or Replacement Players – pose a real risk to your team and organization. Failure to appropriately address issues associated with Replacement Players can foster resentment, mixed messages and lack of accountability throughout your scope of influence and the entire organization.
Here are a few steps we recommend when determining if it’s time to terminate and replace an employee:
- Communicate expectations with all team members.
- Regularly engage with employees to share what is working and not working.
- Conduct ongoing evaluations so poor performance is not a surprise.
- Review previous Truvelop scores and history, performance assessments or reviews.
- Review results of PIPs
- Ensure you have all documentation where you have discussed and documented performance or attitude issues and discussed these issues with the team member. If you have been using Truvelop, that will all be present in the team members’ Summary history.
- In conjunction with senior leadership and/or the human resources department, assess and understand the risks associated with terminating this team member.
Truvelop can provide you with a comprehensive snapshot of your team and the capabilities and gaps that exist which can inform your hiring strategy.
After you have terminated an employee, take the time to evaluate your current team members, reviewing their scores, comments, PIPs and opportunity for growth or improvement. Determine if you have existing employees who can move into new roles before making a decision on how to replace the terminated employee. With so many job opportunities in the marketplace, don’t overlook an employee who may be biding time and hoping their hard work will pay off with a promotion.
If an employee shows an interest in a new role, don’t dismiss them before having a conversation with them about their goals and skillsets. It could be that you are overlooking traits that could make them a good fit for a new role, or the opportunity to work with the employee to create a performance development plan to help them gain the skills needed to move into that new role.
Taking the time to understand your employees’ goals and intentions could be extremely important in retaining employees who might otherwise be frustrated and feel undervalued.
Detailed documentation and frequent evaluations are critical to supporting a manager’s decisions for hiring, firing and replacing employees.
Contact us today to learn more about our modern approach to performance management and development that actually improves the manager and employee relationship by taking your managers to the next level. Don’t just take our word for it, see what our Customers have to say.
