How to Fire Someone: Offboarding the right way

How to fire someone is a hard question. Whether you’re firing or being fired, the process of separating from a company is never easy for anyone. Here are five tips on how to fire someone to make the offboarding process easier your former employee and your team.

How to fire someone:

1. Be direct: Being uncomfortable can lead to a lot of hemming and hawing when the time comes to have the conversation about employee termination. You owe your employee a short, direct conversation.“Bob, unfortunately we have to let you go. Nothing to do with you or your work, some outside factors forced us to make some hard decisions.”It’s respectful, quick, and direct.
2. Keep Company Culture In Mind: Transparency is crucial to building a healthy, successful company. The quickest way to kill employee productivity is by suddenly going quiet on them when they hear that their colleagues are getting fired.Get the team together, announce that some folks will be leaving the team, and take ownership for the reasons they’ll be leaving. Explain why the departures are necessary for the company to succeed. This transparency will be appreciated and will make it easier for your team to understand the “why” of the firings. This will ensure that company culture and employee productivity remain intact.
3. IT Security Should Be Prioritized: There are horror stories about companies that forgot to offboard a former employee from a single system and paid the price in bad PR about an “ IT security breach.”Have a clearly defined process to offboard employees, particularly those with access to any company data, in a quick, and complete manner. Your IT security is tied directly to your reputation, make sure it’s being protected during the offboarding process.
4. Make it quick: The process for offboarding, from logins to computers, should be fast and efficient for the sake of your team and former employee. Have a system in place that allows for one (or a few) clicks to remove an employee from a system like JIRA or Google Apps. Once technology access is dealt with, have a clear and quick process for recovering computers and keys.The speed of this process is crucial for reducing stress on the former employee and for reducing impact on employee productivity.
5. Get better: Take an opportunity to learn from your former employee. Asking them how you can get better on their way out gives them an opportunity to give some unvarnished feedback.With that feedback you can improve company culture, employee engagement, and employee retention. Making this process systematic ensures you’re being considerate to your former employee while still getting as much information as possible.

Ultimately, how to fire someone is less about a grand plan and more about having empathy, being direct, keeping security in mind, and communicating clearly.