No Hiring Decision is Irreversible
Unfortunately, not every hiring decision is going to be a good one. Keeping a bad employee, even one that is productive, ends up causing more harm than good, has a tremendous cost in real dollars, and impacts your other workers.
You can’t grow a successful business without good people. As the owner, it’s your job to define the skills and attitude that you want your employees to have. Then, you need to identify people that fit your values and recruit, train, and retain them. Without question, this can be a huge challenge when there is a shortage of skilled workers across the industry.
A smart, skilled candidate with the ability to learn and a great attitude will always be in demand from competitors who are willing to pay top dollar for that person. One of the best ways to make sure you always have good employees is to keep a deep bench. This doesn’t mean everyone needs to be on your payroll. Keep a list of workers in your community that you’d want to work for you. By always being ready to hire, you’ll feel confident instead of pressured when the time comes and with a sufficiently long list of candidates, you’ll almost always have someone who is ready for a change or to pick up some extra hours.
Sometimes a candidate who seems like a great choice turns out to have overstated their qualifications, has a problem with authority, or doesn’t fit in with other workers. When it’s obvious that an employee is not working out, owners need to act quickly and decisively. That means taking clear corrective action that defines for the employee what they need to do differently and the consequences if they can’t change their behavior. Most people are generous and want to give employees multiple chances to correct a problem, but at a certain point you’ll know in your heart when someone just needs to go. One of the biggest mistakes you can make in your business is not firing a bad employee quickly enough.
There are a lot of reasons for this, but the most obvious one is that firing someone just feels lousy. A big part of everyone’s identity is the job they do and when you fire someone, you’re taking that away. When making the decision, you are rarely ever weighing just the employee’s performance. Instead, you’re thinking about things like how long the person has been with the company, the impact that firing them will have on their friends in the organization, the message it sends to other employees, and the financial and emotional impact on the employee’s family. All of this weighs in on your decision of whether an employee really deserves to be fired and can cause you to delay.
Another reason that owners are hesitant to fire a bad employee is because of the idea that terminating an employee is going to be a lot of work. “I’m too busy to deal with the hassle” is an excuse many owners use not to fire an employee. It’s worth taking time upfront to put very clear policies in place and share them with your workers. These should set up proper expectations about how employees are to conduct themselves and how termination will occur if necessary. Having a game plan makes the process easier, if not less stressful. The employee who is most dangerous to your business is the one who thinks they are going to get fired, not the one you fired quickly.
Perhaps the worst reason of all is that the owner believes the employee is irreplaceable because of some special knowledge or skill that no one else in the company has and, if the employee is let go, things will unravel. This is particularly prominent with office staff who frequently serve as the middleman between customers, the financial system, and people doing the work. This is the most insidious reason to keep someone because it’s almost never true, but it feels true.
One of the common reasons that this holds up employers from terminating a bad employee is the fear that other employees will resent having to do “extra” work when the bad employee is gone. In reality, when you finally get around to firing a problem employee, what you’ll almost always find is that your staff has been wondering why you didn’t fire the person sooner. Always keep in mind that the problems an employee causes you are almost always less stressful and irritating than the problems the worker causes for your good people.
This post originally appeared on the Field Nimble Blog. Check it out to read our other articles that go more in-depth about running a better and more profitable business.
