How To Get Fired and How To Fire Someone Else

Two interesting articles for your Thursday:

-The first is from Career Solvers and gives a lesson on how to get fired. Although the author is talking about firing her phone company, many of these same principles apply to the workplace. They are:

1. Not showing up for work
2. Coming to work unprepared
3. Blaming others for the team's errors
4. Not communicating with others
5. Telling the boss (me) you couldn’t get a project done because it was understaffed.
6. Asking for a raise before you have proved your value. 

The post ends with this bit of advice on why to eliminate these practices from your repotoire:

According to CareerBuilder’s 2010 Jobs Forecast a trend for 2010 may very well be replacing lower performing employees and taking advantage of the large percentage of top talent in the labor force to strengthen their work force. Because in this economy, employers have choices…and there are plenty of job seekers out there that would love to be employed by them.

-On the flip side, Easy Small Business HR has Do's and Don'ts (or is it "don't's"?) when firing employees. Some of those:

Don't: 

• Leave the task to someone who does not have direct supervision of the worker being fired.
  
• Fire an employee on the spot unless the actions are so egregious that it requires immediate removal from the workplace.

Do:

• Fire workers who have crossed the line of what is considered egregious inappropriate behavior if you are absolutely certain based on the facts that the employee is guilty of misconduct.
• Respect the privacy and confidentiality of everyone involved by meeting with your employee(s) in a private area
• Tell your employee the reason for the termination.

Some good advice from those two sources...though you should only be following the latter!