Poor Performance
terrima
6 Posts
We have an employee who has been given numerous warnings regarding their poor perforance. My question is does anyone know if we can lower their wage to the minimum for that position rather than firing that person and still have it be legal or do we have to totally reclassify them? We should of fired this person long time ago but did not.
Comments
I just don't see what positive results you'll get from cutting someone's pay who really just needs to move on, unless there is a position you can demote them to, along with appropriate reduction in pay, that better suits their abilities.
If this person needs to be moved out and you just can't get your bosses support, then you might do a final warning outlining all the previous warnings, explain all the procedures the employee has failed to follow which resulted in the poor performance. It almost always comes down to steps the employee failed to take which resulted in the poor performance. Present this document to your boss, then follow up with your boss for a term if/when the employee continues failing to follow procedure.
In a few past cases, while creating the document, I figured out on my own (or with help of the Forum) why this person should NOT be termed when I was at first set on terming. This has happened to me in cases where termination seemed clear-cut until I compiled the background into one document and our own issues were more obvious, whether it be the training was inadequate, the employee hadn't been warned as many times as I'd thought, there were other circumstances involved, etc.
There I go not answering the original question again.
Let us know how this goes forward.
Basically ask yourself, is it the employees fault that they do not perform the job the way we expect? Or, did the employer not provide enough feed back and training? You can't expect an ee to change if they are given specific areas to improve and how and when those improvements should occur.
My biggest pet peeve is when an employer tells an ee to improve their attitude, but makes no suggestions on how this should be accomplished or what specifically needs to be improved. Changing your attitude is so vauge. What does that mean anyway? What BEHAVIOURS not TRAITS does this person need to improve upon and if he/she does then does she get to move back to her old position at her old payrate and if so, how long does she have to be demoted for?
I think there is more to this that we can help you with if you could provide more details, especially why your boss would be afraid of a lawsuit.