Transcript for "jeff kuzmich - Migrate_Smooth_Exits_High_Risk_Terminations_02192025_4820953":
Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's event on smooth exits, best practices for high risk terminations. My name is Rob Parsons, and I manage brand and content here at Paychex, and I'll be moderating this webinar. So before we get into the content, just want to cover a few housekeeping items. First, note the primary audio is going to be coming through your computer, so just make sure that's set up correctly. You got it turned on, the audio's there correctly. Also, if you ever have to refresh your browser, you can use these key commands we have here on screen. That will fraction up in case you hit any glitches. Our webinar allows you to customize the view so you can enlarge and move windows and slides around. So get it set up so you get the best possible experience. I do want to point out two other important features to you. First of all, you can download and print a copy of today's content for future reference. And you can access additional resources that we have loaded up in the files and resources window at the top right corner of your console. That's available anytime during the event. And we'll also be sending a follow-up email after the event, so you can get back in and download any of these files, any of these resources. Also, if you have any questions during today's webinar, and I suspect we're going to get a lot of them, you can send them via the Ask Us a Question window or the Ask Us widget located at the bottom of the webcast screen. Just write in your question and click Submit. I hope we'll have time to get to them all. We can't be super specific, so we'll try to keep it general and I'll try to sift through the questions and handle those as best I can. Also, please note this presentation does not constitute legal advice. It's for informational purposes only. Now, I'd like to introduce our presenters. Please help me welcome Amanda Kennedy and Jared Rudder to the event. Amanda joined Paychex in 2021 as a Human Resource Business Partner and she's currently on the Risk and Response Team. She's worked in HR for thirteen years, she's a certified professional with the Society of Human Resources Management, and she holds a Master's degree from Villanova University in HR Development. Jared has worked in the HR field for over twenty years. He currently works as an HR Services Risk Partner, collaborating with HR Business Partners to support Paychex clients with their workforce needs. He has a Bachelor's Degree in Business Administration and HR Management from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. He's also PHR certified, CP certified with the Society of Human Resources Management. Welcome Amanda, Jared, and Amanda, why don't you kick us off by sharing what we'll be covering today? Absolutely. Thanks Rob. So terminating an employee can be a high stake emotionally charged responsibility for any owner or manager. Mishandling can lead to expensive lawsuits, low morale, and potential major workforce disruptions, whether due to downsizing, reskilling, or individual performance. Understanding the right approach is crucial for safeguarding your business, caring for your people, and preserving company culture. So with that in mind, we're going to help you understand what's at stake by learning the latest trends, terminology, and scenarios surrounding high risk terminations. We'll help you reduce vulnerability with knowledge to minimize exposure to your business. We'll help you learn step by step guidance on the process with clear, actionable steps before, during, and after termination, and we'll help you access practical tools and resources to minimize and ensure nothing is overlooked. Let's start setting the foundation for the essentials you need to know about workforce management struggles and terminations. Business leaders and managers are struggling with managing employee performance, conducting layoffs, maintaining compliance when conducting terminations, and managing the cost of employee turnover. You can see from this slide that 93% of business leaders find it challenging to manage workforce performance. 37% of companies have conducted layoffs in the past two years, representing 11% of their workforce. One in two leaders say it's difficult to maintain compliance with terminations, and employee terminate or I'm sorry. Employee turnover costly averaging over $9,000 per person. Terminating an employee's employment means that the employee no longer works for the company. This may happen for several reasons, including organizational changes, disciplinary actions, leaving voluntarily, getting fired. Each circumstance requires a slightly different approach and will present different options to the departing employee. For example, an employee who has been laid off through a reduction in force may qualify for unemployment insurance, whereas somebody who quits voluntarily or is fired for cause may not. Even when you've documented poor performance, issued warnings, followed every protocol, it can feel like you're walking a legal tightrope when letting go of an employee who is chronically absent, an employee who's potentially misusing FMLA, or somebody whose accommodations just are no longer working. We've seen in many circumstances where managers wanna fire an employee, and they don't understand all that goes into doing a termination right, leaving the company exposed to risk. The key to doing it right is preparation. Hey, Amanda. Yes, Jared. Hi, all. Jared Rutter here. It I think it would be helpful, for the viewers to hear a little bit of a high level breakdown or differentiation between terminations that focus on behavioral issues or misconduct versus something that might be a bit more performance focused. Absolutely. So this is one of my favorite topics to even chat about, and that is something I like to describe as skill versus will. Does the employee have the skill, the knowledge, the abilities to do the job, or do they have the will to do the job? If the employee doesn't have the skills, knowledge, and abilities, that's generally a performance issue. That means they perhaps weren't trained properly. Perhaps their training was rushed. Maybe they weren't given as much access to the proper systems that they needed to be given, etcetera. Will generally comes down to behavior. Will issues tend to lead to misconduct. Misconduct is or behavior tends to be examples of insubordination, policy violations, violating the standards of conduct, things like theft, getting into fights with employees or customers, something along those lines. Performance is really do they have the tools to do their job effectively and efficiently? And there's two different ways to handle behavior and misconduct versus performance. When we think about performance issues and an employee that's just not meeting expectations, that should be handled with a performance improvement plan, with very specific goals that have metrics tied to them and are measurable to allow the employee to have time to improve their performance and to be able to meet expectations. Whereas behavior or misconduct issues are going to be handled with disciplinary action. Generally, you know, provide the employee a written warning or I'm sorry, a verbal warning for first, and then that would lead to a written warning, a final written warning, and then potentially termination. So those are kind of overview of behavior and misconduct versus performance issues and kind of the different ways that they could be handled. Jared, do you think that was enough information? Yeah. Fantastic. Thank you, Amanda. Alright. Sounds good. Yeah. That was great, Amanda. I love skill versus will. What a great way to break it down. So we got a quick poll coming up on screen forever. I'd like you to take a look at us. This one's just to give us a feel for what our audience has gone through, what their experience levels are, what they've dealt with in the past. Question is, how many of you have had to conduct employee terminations in the past year? A simple I have or I have not. Let's just hear, and this doesn't mean that you feel like you did it well, this doesn't mean that you understood skill versus will, Just a matter of have you had to go through this and, you know, likely, are you looking to be going through it again in the future at some time? For which this content is going to be super, super valuable. So hopefully everybody's had a chance to enter their answers here. And boy, 75% of our attendees have had to do this in the past year, which is tough. I know it's an emotional situation, it's a fraught situation. Jared, I'd like to hand off to you now just to cover off on, you know, what they can expect in this presentation and what we're going to help them with, whether they've conducted terminations or not. Yeah, and that poll number doesn't really surprise me, frankly. And I was just kind of thinking to myself how high it was going to be. I mean, if you look over the course of the past, not only a year, but it's been a bit of a rough ride over the course of the past four or five years, a lot of reduction in force rifts with COVID, came out of COVID, which then took us into frankly some over hiring and some bad hiring. Part of that was due to the great resignation. So I think in a lot of ways, while we are starting to see now a bit of an uptick in reduction in forces primarily related to some of that over hiring that I mentioned and interest rates were even now starting to see a splash of reduction in forces that are a bit proactive in nature as it pertains to uncertainty with tariffs. But I think a lot of what we're seeing right now and again, why I wasn't necessarily surprised with that number is that great resignation and the over hiring. There was just a lot of bad hires and I think we're still seeing the ramifications or repercussions of that. So, but thank you everybody for participating in the poll, those of you that did. So when we talk about termination, all of them can carry some degree of risk. It's just the nature of the beast. There's no real way to get around it. What you see on the screen right now are going to be some of the more pertinent or types of risks that are typically going to impact a termination most often. So when we talk legal and the financial risks, again, there's no real way to completely avoid it. So we're looking at oftentimes legal fees. For example, if you end up with a nasty gram from the EEOC or you end up with a notice of active litigation, whether it did something bad or you didn't do something bad, you're still going to need find yourself an attorney so that the attorney can help you and that costs money. So that's always going to be a factor. The key is to try to best position yourself so that in the event that execute a termination and you do see a claim or notice of litigation, you wanna be as best positioned as possible to defend that even if it does involve engaging your attorney, you can provide all of that to your attorney. When we talk about reputational risks, this is gonna be very industry specific, very fact pattern specific. One of the first examples, I guess that comes to mind and as I do this longer, this example gets older and older, but some of you may remember, I wanna say it was 2012 give or take, but Citibank terminated an employee and the employee filed suit based on the premise that she was, I'm using air quotes, terminated for being too hot. Basically the abbreviated version is that she was curvy, and Citibank felt that she was violating their dress code and, reached the point in which she was terminated and heard the fencer argument was basically, well, I can't help it. I'm pretty confident that that finished or that was It went through mandatory arbitration. So I don't know what the actual outcome was. Doesn't matter. My main point being is that Citibank was suddenly in the news and their reputation, was being questioned based on that. Regardless as to whether they did something wrong or did something right, it was out there. So where we see this becoming an issue from our perspective, a lot of times it has to do with childcare, long term care facilities where if you have a situation in which an employee is terminated, maybe it's not handled the best, that gets out into the community and people tend to justifiably so get relatively concerned about the safety of their children while they're at that daycare. And it could theoretically make people think twice. So it's something to consider. And another reason as to why it's important to make sure that these terminations are buttoned up. When we talk about impact on morale, this is typically going to be decreased productivity, can lead to additional turnover. We see this very often with RIFs or reduction in force and the negative impact it can have on the morale of the employees who are seeing their friends, coworkers being terminated. And in some situations questioning, oh, am I that? Am I gonna have a job? And that can have a negative impact on productivity. And again, it can trickle over into generating turnover. Breach of confidentiality. Again, this is oftentimes going to be somewhat industry specific, but when you look at a termination, some of the things that should be considered are your data, your IP and what's going to happen if that individual is terminated and they don't take it well. You have non disclosure agreements in place or confidentiality agreements or non compete if it's even enforceable. So something to consider operational risks. Again, this is somewhat going to tie into morale, but workplace disruptions, loss of knowledge, it necessitates having to find someplace else to go with the work that the employee that's being exited was responsible for. And how long is that going to be necessary for somebody else to cover that work. You're gonna have to post a requisition for a job. All of that can have a negative impact on the operation of the company. And there are with every termination going to be compliance and regulatory situations or items to keep in mind. And when you look at employment law violations and discrimination claims, each situation is going to be unique. We're not today going to talk about the analysis of a situation in which a determination is being made as to whether or not someone should be terminated. That is a completely separate discussion for another day. But having said that, there are going to be scenarios in which you need to consider, okay, if we terminate this person, is this person in the higher risk protected class? Do they have medical conditions that need to be considered? You can look at the opposite side of the equation. You can start to look at whether retaining the employee could create risks. And an example of that could be, all right, OSHA and the general duty clause that comes along with OSHA. So all factors that need to be considered. Again, we're not talking analysis. We're not talking about whether or not a decision to terminate is defensible is that something that should be looked at and an individualized assessment should be conducted in each of those situations. And there are gonna be some that just flat out boil down to this business decisions, right? Maybe there's a higher risk termination, but it's felt by the company decision makers, owners, whoever it may be that we just need this person gone. We're willing to take on that risk. Or if it's a reduction in force, we just can't afford to pay this employer, these employees and you're willing to take on that risk. So what we're going to talk about next is going to focus on terminology. So we will discuss some of the more prevalent terms, and first voluntary termination. And I wanna make it very, very clear. I'm guessing that many of you are already aware of this, but a voluntary termination does bring with it risk. There is no such thing as a risk free termination, even if it is the employee voluntarily terminating. And there is the misconception by some that if the employee resigns, that the employer is in the clear and that's not necessarily the case. But in its most basic frameworks, a voluntary termination is someone leaving the company on their own choice. When you look at involuntary terminations, these are going to be riskier in nature and as the term would suggest, the employee is not leaving voluntarily, they're basically being asked to leave or told to leave. This can go in a number of different directions, so there can be a number of different root causes. Amanda touched on misconduct and poor performance which are honestly going to be the most common. But this is where you could also start to see reorganizations or reduction in force. No call, show or job abandonment. Those are scenarios in which there's the employee is not voluntarily leaving, they're being forced out for some reason, and those are going to typically be more risky. Wrongful termination is a very general term that basically means what you did, you shouldn't have did, and you somehow, some way are violating a law. When Amanda and I in our roles look at a termination matter is what we would refer to it internally and one of our clients is looking to terminate someone, wrongful termination when we partner with our HR business partners is a term that sometimes just gets floated around as we are trying to actively identify risks. So if we ask, okay, well, what's the risk with termination? Sometimes we will hear wrongful termination. Well, right. What does that mean? Wrongful termination is the illegal act of terminating somebody, but the illegalness could be different reasons, discrimination, harassment, retaliation, a breach of contract could fall into there, particularly if you're looking at a CBA, someone who is taking jury duty because they have a legal obligation to do so when they're terminated or perceived as being terminated before or because of it, those are all items that would categorically fall under wrongful termination. Just remember that wrongful termination is very vague and when you are working through the considerations of a termination and whether it should be executed in the first place, always wanna try to narrow yourself down to what are the actual risks or the potential identified wrongdoing. And then lastly, employment at will. Just about every state in the country is fully employment at will. The one exception is Montana and their wrongful discharge from employment act. I remember very, very specifically my wonderful mother, Bonnie, she goes my bonbon or at least she does with us. But she called me one day and she was a nurse. She was at a hospital working and she told me, yeah, Jared, this is an employment at Will hospital. They're just walking around firing people. Like, well, bonbon, didn't call her bonbon, I called her mom, but that's not exactly how it works. Like they can walk around and they can fire people and they don't necessarily have to have a reason to do it, but that reason can't be for an illegal reason. So basically meaning if someone is terminated and it's perceived as the termination being based on the employee's race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, gender, whatever it may be, and the company can't prove otherwise, well, that is basically going to be an illegal reason. So employment at will does mean that you can terminate anybody with or without reason, employee can quit, there's no contract, but that does not eliminate the need for an employer to have the ability to prove that what was done was not quote unquote illegal. Hey, Jared, I have a quick question. Yeah. I was wondering if you could kind of expand on voluntary terminations and give some examples about what might fall into that category a little bit more. Yeah. I'm glad you jumped in there. I probably went through that a little bit quickly but there are scenarios in which an employee that terminates could still be protected if they voluntarily terminated for a reason in which the employer did not do their due diligence. For example, there's a term constructive discharge basically in which an employee quits because they can no longer handle working in the workplace. Usually this is going to be tied to harassment or discrimination. It doesn't necessarily have to be. I can think of a very specific situation that I ran into. I think it maybe it was about four or five months ago, give or take, but had one of our clients, they had an employee, two employees, three employees, frankly, they got in a workplace altercation. There were weapons kind of involved. In any event, the client didn't want to investigate and their strategy was to put two of the three on an unpaid suspension and just wait until they quit. That arguably could be a form of constructive discharge. They just keep that person out there or both of them and they don't allow them to work. They don't allow them to earn a living, that could be grounds for a constructive discharge claim even though it's not necessarily tied to anything that would be protected such as a traditional harassment discrimination. There are other scenarios that we run into from time to time. And this can sometimes relate to no call, no show related situations. It's fairly common for an employer to have a no call, no show or a job abandonment related situation. And they just see it as cut and dry, super easy. Well, our handbook says three days, it's been three days and we're terminating them. In some situations that is in fact going to be, the approach that can be taken. But what we do see fairly regularly is there was something going on prior to the employee going MIA. A lot of times or of late what we've seen have been a known disability of some sort. And if the employer didn't take sufficient documented steps to engage in the interactive process or try to identify whether or not an accommodation was necessary, in some situations, it's theoretically possible that that employee could come back and say, well, my employer didn't accommodate me. I couldn't do the job anymore. So I had no choice but to just walk away. Right? So that's a scenario where there could be risk even though it is the employee who is breaking the employment relationship. So it's a great question. Thank you for calling that out, Amanda. I appreciate it. Right. What's a high risk termination? And I would look at this more from the perspective of what is a higher risk termination. And I say that having mentioned previously that all terminations carry some degree of risk. What you see on this slide are going to be the factors that typically will make a termination more risky. Protected class, age, race, religion, important to always consider are there any state specific anti discrimination laws or any local ordinances that may supplement or add protected classes to the federal law such as Section seven eighty eight, ADEA. Even if you are under that 15 or 20 employee threshold at the federal level, there may be something at the state or local level that's going to pick up and provide protection to the employee. So always something that should be considered. Recent complaints are whistleblowing. We see a lot of NLRA section seven violation related matters or terminations. It can be a scenario as far as recent complaints in which the employee has recently filed a claim of harassment and now the employee wants to terminate that person, even though it may not have anything to do with the claim itself. The optics sometimes can be difficult. And if the employer hasn't taken steps to document the actual reason for termination and the steps that they've taken, those are scenarios that can carry a higher degree of risk. Health disability related reasons. This is, and it feels like, and I don't have data in front of me to substantiate this, but it feels like when COVID hit, we started to see a ton of help and disability related requests for accommodations and scenarios in which an employee wanted to terminate an employee in somehow some way, the employee's help tied into the analysis of the matter. Work from home, incredibly prevalent. When employees were called back into the office, we saw a wave and continue to frankly of employees who were requesting accommodations for a disability to work from home. And I'm not suggesting that those are fictitious disabilities or claims requests that are baseless, but the employer needs to take that into consideration. And there's a process that would need to be worked through before a decision could be made as to you, all right, well, if we terminate this person, is their help or their known disability going to create a problem or exposure to risk that we are not in a position to defend? Highly emotional or aggressive situations, I mean, this starts to get into workplace violence, which we do unfortunately see, have seen and will continue to see. A lot of that can be proactively mitigated to a degree by taking certain steps beforehand. But, during the meeting itself, it's important to keep this in mind so that keep it cool, even keel, particularly if you know that someone maybe runs a little bit hot. So poor documentation, policy gaps, easily without question, the biggest shortfall that we see on a regular basis when we have matters that are brought to us. Clients either haven't documented prior disciplinary actions well, they haven't documented poor performance, as Amanda mentioned earlier when she spoke to behavioral issues or misconduct related issues, scenarios in which maybe there aren't clear policies in place and those policies haven't been presented to the employee or the employer can't prove it. But poor documentation will create risk and it also just flat out makes it harder to defend a decision as being non wrongful, discriminatory, retaliatory, insert wrongfulness. Now I mentioned section seven of the NLRA and where we are also seeing a surge in termination focused matters in which the NLRA ties in, social media. And I had a matter very recently that involved two employees that were not speaking very kindly of the business owners on social media. I won't mention the name of the social media platform, but it wasn't good. However, within the same post by those two employees, there was discussion and expression of concerns over volume of work, management, pay. So those are comments that under the NLRA in section seven are protected, protected concerted activity. So if you run into a scenario, which if you haven't, you probably will at some point in which there are inappropriate social media posts from an employee. They very well may be in a position in which you can terminate them and feel pretty good about doing it, but the specifics are going to matter. And it's imperative that that scenario and the fact pattern associated with it be looked at and whether it's with the assistance of counsel, whether it's through your paychecks, HR business partner, if you're a current client or if you're looking to be a client, we can help you out with that. But each individual situation needs to be looked at, analyzed, a risk level needs to be assessed. And then from there, it becomes a matter of, okay, what type of position of defensibility are we in? But social media, is still a little bit of, it still has a little bit of a wild wild west feel to it, particularly because there just isn't a lot of legislation out there that addresses it. Okay. So I'm gonna tell you a super super quick story very quick. A legal partner that I worked very closely with for quite a few years, she was an attorney. She dressed up for Halloween as an attorney and her costume consisted of a plain t shirt that across the front of it said, it depends. If you work with attorneys on any regular basis, you will hear them say that very regularly. It depends. It's hard to ask a straightforward question because in their eyes, and this is something that Amanda and I have to look at as well, the specifics of the situation dictate the answer that's going to be delivered. So I bring that up for two reasons. One, just to reiterate Rob's disclaimer earlier, Amanda and I are not attorneys. We cannot provide a legal recommendation or legal advice. Therefore anything discussed today is not legal advice. But the next few slides as we talk about steps and before, during and after, you will notice that there are certain things that you can make the argument maybe should be done before the termination meeting, or maybe they should be done during. Every situation is unique. So this isn't intended to be a one size fits all type of presentation. It's going to cover most scenarios but you may find that there are some things that could easily be moved around. Having said that, if we talk about before, are certain things that you're going to want to do. Some of this is going to be determined by potential state law, local ordinance, but it's important to make sure that you understand the final pay requirements of the state and make sure that you have are prepared to pay an employee in the event that you're going to terminate them and the state perhaps requires payment within twenty four hours, which is an expectation of some states. Do that research. Some of this is also going to depend on past precedent. What have you done in the past? Some of it's gonna depend on policy, but those are scenarios that you're going to need to consider. Notice of termination, if it's a reduction in force, depending upon the size of the reduction in force, you may have worn requirements. If it's a mass layoff, basically you need to provide your employees with advanced notice of their layoff. There are what are often referred to as mini worn laws that are out there as well. Those are usually going to pick up or cover smaller sized employers. So at the federal level kicks in on a 100 employees that a lot of the mini warrants or the state specific laws are going to pick up smaller sized companies. But some of them do also write in very specific language. New York, I believe just passed a law that supplements their mini war law that basically stipulates if you are going to execute a reduction in force because of AI, basically AI is taking work away and there's no longer a need for people. In that type of situation there are specific notices that need to be provided to employees. So in addition to warn and many warn laws, when we talk about separation or notice of separation, some states have a formal separation notice requirements. Usually they're focused on unemployment and letting the employee know in writing, hey, you're being terminated, you are eligible for unemployment. This is how you go about filing for unemployment. Preparation for documentation or and documentation is going to be rather situation specific. There may be scenarios in which it makes sense to go into a termination meeting with past documentation that the employee perhaps has been provided with documentation reflecting prior verbal warnings, written warnings. It could be a situation in which you go in and you need to remind the employee of their NDA or some type of agreement that they signed. So be prepared to go in with those documents if the situation warrants doing so. And then there are going to be certain due diligence expectations and this falls into the realm of it may make the most sense in some of these situations to take these steps afterwards isn't necessarily always a right or a wrong, but if they are part of your group health insurance plan or benefit plans, you are going to want to make sure that you are addressing their coverage with the carrier, make sure COBRA notifications go out. There are scenarios where the employee may perhaps be working under an employment contract. We see this quite often, for example, with doctors, dentists that are working under a contract. And it's important in those situations to differentiate between, can we terminate this person and could we defend some form of a wrongful termination claim versus are we in breach of contract by terminating this person? You very well may be well positioned to terminate if one of the doctors or dentists or use your imagination did something that would warrant termination and that can be proven. The contract side of that, however, is going to make things complicated from the perspective of, okay, well, do we need to pay this person out for the rest of their contract? Is our reason for termination going to satisfy the terms of the contract show that it was actually the employee that was in breach of contract? So that's anytime you necessitate the interpretation of a contract, we're always going to need to refer or suggest that you engage your attorney, because the attorney will be able to give you that perspective. And then a transition plan. Think of this as like a mini form of BCP or business continuity plan. I mentioned earlier that you have an employee, that employee has work, where is that work going? Who's going to cover it? Are you going to split that employees up, work up short term between Amanda and Jared? Or are you gonna use a temp agency? What are you going to do? That's going to be important and that's going to impact work productivity. Bottom line is you need to know what you're looking at as it pertains to state, local requirements, federal requirements, and make sure that all of that is buttoned up before the actual termination meeting is held. Now that termination meeting itself, and this you can make the argument would fit in the before section, but lay out what you're going to discuss. Don't go in there and just freestyle it like M and M or whatever. Know what you're going to say, stick to those points, don't get off track and don't get emotional. And they can be very emotional discussions. Of course, you're ending someone's employment. When conducting the meeting, you wanna set expectations right out of the gate, clearly state the outcome, regret to inform you that your employment is being terminated immediately or whatever terminology is gonna make the most sense. Review the reason for the decision. Some states necessitate that you provide this in writing. Some states necessitate that the reason for termination only be provided in writing to the employee if they request it in writing. But you also wanna make sure that you are discussing next steps, what's going to happen, what's gonna happen with benefits, what's gonna happen with company property. But what you want to also ensure that you do is don't tiptoe into the realm of exposing yourself to a potential defamation or libel or slander claim, which we don't see often but there are scenarios in which if you were to, for example, terminate someone because of a lack of integrity, it's a very subjective reason for termination. And depending upon the state and depending upon what their defamation laws look like, and this gets outside our area of expertise, just FYI, It's important that people understand the reason for termination and don't have reason to assume that it is some kind of character disparagement. Where we also see this from time to time, real life example had a matter an employee was falsifying commission data record keeping. Basically that was resulting in the employee being paid more in commission than what actually should have been or should have earned. And the employee never admitted it. They were able to show that the employee was in fact falsifying documentation, but the employer in that situation was insistent on calling it theft. They are stealing from me. We're terminating this employee because they are stealing. It's theft, they're a thief. And because of the circumstances and because of state law for this specific situation, we really needed to encourage the client to don't call it theft. They violated a policy, they falsified records, that's all you need. If the employee had admitted to theft, well then there's less risk of a potential defamation claim. So I bring this up only to show that if you lay all this stuff out ahead of time and you outline what you're going to say, there is less likelihood of you accidentally walking into or talking yourself into one of these types of scenarios where you could expose yourself to unintended risk. And then have a plan this to a degree to be a before aspect or fall into the before category. But I feel like this goes two ways. Internal communication, you wanna make sure that employees know what's going on to the degree in which you're able to tell them what's going on. And if it's say for example, a reduction in force or someone who just flat out is struggling and you want to make sure that you are providing them with assistance with finding a new job, which sometimes employers will do, I think that falls into this category as well. But stay on track, stay on point, be brief and get yourself out of there because it's not going to be a fun discussion for, anybody. After Just wanted to give a heads up to the audience. I know we were scheduled for forty five, and I told you there was gonna be a lot of content to cover. Everybody, please stay with us. Jared's still got more great content for you, and I'm hoping to get to some q and a. If you have to drop, understood. We'll have a recording for you after the fact. But yeah, Jared, go ahead. Please keep going. Great content. And we'll try to get to as many questions at the end as we can as well. All right, super. Thanks, Rob. Appreciate the heads up. You get carried away sometimes. After exit interview, an exit interview is not going to be for all terminations. If you are involuntarily terminating someone and that person is not thrilled, they're not likely to give you anything that will be of value in an exit interview. There is benefit to an exit interview, particularly with the voluntary termination. I mentioned constructive discharge. An exit interview can act as a document that can provide a defense if during that exit interview there is no mention of harassment discrimination and there is a constructive discharge based claim after the fact it's one additional piece of paper that an employer theoretically would have that would allow them to defend that claim. But it also is important for purposes of company improvement. Maybe there's an opportunity to improve management skills. Maybe your benefits aren't the best. An exit interview is going to provide that type of information. Communications, this too, you're gonna wanna look at making sure that other managers know what's going on, how they should address it. If they get questions from other employees, again, it's imperative the confidentiality be maintained. Administration, there are aspects here that are going to fall into the before category in certain situations. So when we talk about administration, we're talking about COBRA, four zero one ks. I talked about those components, but this can become somewhat industry specific, but banking and finance is an example that comes up from time to time. You may wanna take steps right before or even during that meeting, have someone do it, but take away their system access. So they can't get into email so that when they walk out of that meeting or they have a phone, whatever it may be, you don't want them to have access to all of those things. And in some situations, again, it's gonna be more pertinent. Banking and finance is a perfect example. Credit cards, if they have a credit card, make sure that that bad boy shut down. And then review the process so that you have an opportunity or the ability to see what you did, how it went and do you need to make modifications for future terminations because you inevitably will have them. All right, Rob, I'm gonna hand it back to you for another poll. Fantastic. Thank you, Jared. This kicks into a podcast you and I did a couple of years back. Have you ever rehired an employee you've had to let go before? This one's really interesting because I think this speaks to the lot input you were giving us there, Jared, on how to handle the termination, how to handle the before, the during, the after. Really good content. Sometimes we have to let people go we don't want to let go. Sometimes, I think Amanda's point about will versus skill, it's a skill situation. We liked Bob, he was great, just wasn't cutting the mustard in this particular role, but we like his attitude, we like his ethics. So I'm just curious, in our audience, have you ever rehired an employee you've had to let go before? I'll give you just a minute there and we'll see what we come up with here. Alright. So almost a third have and then another 14% were open to the possibility. Jared, I know you've done a lot of talking. Maybe you can give us a little, just a little insight here around this topic, before we hand it back off to Amanda. Yeah. And to Rob's point, or he brought up that we had a webinar in the past that talked about, we call them boomerang employees. So this can make for a rather lengthy discussion, but there are benefits to it. And we have seen a lot of rehires and a lot of it ties back to the great resignation. People were leaving because of either the perception that the grass was greener on the other side or in many situations employers were overpaying to fill positions. So we saw employees leave and hate the new job or find out it wasn't what they thought it was going to be and then want to come back. And there's benefit in many situations to bring someone back, obviously if they were a good employee, But it can be faster to rehire, it can be less expensive. The speed to efficiency for those employees can be significantly better. You know who you're bringing into the organization so you're not kind of rolling the dice there. And there may be scenarios even in which an involuntarily terminated employee was terminated. Gotta be very, very delicate with this because you bring someone back, you're willing to rehire them. You could question, well, why did you terminate them in the first place? But sometimes when there's a skillset deficiency and that person is terminated because they just couldn't do the job, but maybe there's a different job and maybe they do have the skill set to effectively perform the essential functions of that job. It may make sense in those situations. So if you get on your old Googler and Google Paychex Boomerang clients or employees, maybe throw my name in there. You can you can check that one out. Pretty proud of it. Alright. So we talked a lot about termination, so we'll kinda talk through steps that you can take now. Don't wait until you need to terminate an employee to prepare. Start taking these steps today to be prepared for when you need to take action. Establish a secure system for storing documents such as HR technology. Use consistent templates for reviews, warnings, and improvement plans, encourage managers and supervisors to maintain confidential employee and management logs, ensure job descriptions are up to date, that employees are clear on the essential functions of their job, and that performance expectations are clearly explained. Define a quality control process to help ensure consistency from manager to manager. Ideally, this is someone from internal HR or some other neutral party who can be involved on a need to know basis. Most importantly, document, document, document. I always say if it's not documented, it did not happen. Document thoroughly but objectively. I cannot overemphasize the importance of sufficient documentation. Objective documentation helps to serve two purposes. It can help to protect the employer in the event of a claim the event a claim is made, sorry, by showing the termination wasn't due to discriminatory or retaliatory reasons, and two, the employee should never be surprised they are being terminated. If the employer has sufficient documentation and has spoken to the employee about termination being a possibility, then there shouldn't be any surprise when that termination meeting happens. Develop employee policies and share them so no one is surprised about the rules and expectations. Conduct manager trainings, and as a reminder, you can use our termination checklist as a starting point to help you out. We hope that this webinar has helped you learn to navigate tough terminations and build the groundwork to help you protect yourself and your organization from the legal pitfalls of employee terminations. Be sure to download the checklist, which you can find in the webinar console, to help you every step of the way. So here's a quick recap of what we've covered. We hope you're better now you're now better equipped to identify and navigate high risk termination scenarios, recognize warning signs, understand protections, and assess impacts, build a strong pre termination foundation, documentation, develop policies and procedures, etcetera, conduct meetings empathetically and lawfully, knowing what to do to stay in compliance, maintain morale and work workforce productivity by effectively communicating to all of those who need to be updated, and safeguard your business against risk and retaliation. With the right skills and confidence, you will be able to handle employee terminations with professionalism and precision. Now I'll turn it back to Rob to help us address some of the questions that you've submitted if we have time. Yeah, time is tight. We're already 10 over, Amanda, but it's a great topic. A lot of good content, a lot of great questions still coming in. We did mention that terminations checklist and I've seen, comments come in that the link is not working. We'll get that fixed. So after the event, we'll be sending up a follow-up email so you can watch this on demand, you can share it, and we'll get that link fixed to make sure we have that checklist for you. Also, a lot of these questions that have come in, we're gonna see if we can't pull together an FAQ of some kind that may not be exactly right away with that return after the webinar, but the content we have on paychecks.com to help everybody out because we know this is a challenging topic. So Amanda, there was a question early on came in when we were talking about will versus skill. This was for Maureen who wanted to know, can you explain what a performance improvement plan is in more detail? I wondered if you could touch on that for us real quick. Yes, I, will definitely touch on it and kinda talk a little bit about how to structure a PIP, knowing that we are over time, so I wanna keep everybody's time, in consideration. When you're thinking about developing a performance improvement plan, you should look at kind of the top three to five job duties that the employee is having deficiencies in, and then create SMART goals around those job duties to structure the performance improvement plan. SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. So you would have, you know, a job duty that the employee is deficient in. You would create a goal around that job duty. When developing the PIP, you'll have those goals, and then there will be kind of a time frame for those employees to improve. Thirty, sixty, ninety days is usually the time frame that most employers utilize for those employees to get better. Weekly check ins are highly, highly, highly important, so managers, supervisors, HR checking in with the employee on a weekly basis to talk about whether or not the employee is improving, what they need to do, how they need to work with another department if needed or another supervisor, what additional training they might need. Those weekly meetings need to be documented so the employee knows whether or not there is still deficiencies or if they are improving or not. One of the biggest things with performance improvement plans also is that consequence statement. Right? So we want to notify the employee that, you know, their performance is expected to improve over a certain amount of time. And if performance is not improved, then termination may occur. So you're notifying the employee that if they don't improve their performance, then they may be terminated. And that's when the or the employee's not surprised that they're getting terminated after a performance improvement plan. That's great. That's That's was a quick, very, description, but Nope, that works a minute. It's funny. Taylor commented that, performance improvement plans could probably use its own webinar, Yeah, for absolutely. And Maureen, asked that question, tells us that the checklist is indeed working. She just had to expand her window so it showed up. So experiment with that a little bit and this console will be available to everybody on demand and it'll be on demand, for quite a long period of time. You can come back and check on this, often as much as you need. And that does bring up time. We're at thirty seconds now. Amanda, Jared, thank you so much. Such great content. This is such an important topic and a difficult topic and I understand why why people were so interested. There's a lot, that you can do. Our Paychex HR professionals are there to help you. So if you're a Paychex HR services customer, I recommend you reach out, work with your HR professional. They can help you with that. And if you'd like to talk to a paycheck sales representative about getting that kind of expert help, to safeguard your business against employee terminations and establishing process to navigate these kinds of changes, We're ready to help you out. We've got a range of different solutions that can come into play here. Everything from handbooks all the way up to just a real expert business partner who's right there, understands your business and works with you to make sure everything goes smooth. And with that, I thank you again for joining us today. Thanks again, Amanda and Jared. Be sure everybody you explore the wealth of resources available to you. We'll be sending you the follow-up so you can get the download. You can print a copy and watch it and share it, to your heart's content. And please, if you have a few extra minutes, we'd love your feedback after the event. Just a little quick survey just to help us improve these presentations, understand topics that are useful to you and how we can better serve you, our clients and our customers. Thank you again.