Terry pranged the company car. Again. Julie’s work on the designs was so sloppy that you had to pay a contractor to redo them. Donald insulted a client at a sales meeting. Now the client has gone to your competitor. In each of those situations, if Terry, Julie, or Donald
So you’ve decided to take the plunge and hire your first employee. Ideally, your employees should make your business life easier. Good staff can really help spread the load. You should also know that employing others comes with certain responsibilities. After all, it’s called an employment relationship. You’re making a
Most employers will tolerate an employee showing up late for work once in a while. We’ve all had a bus arrive late, found ourselves stuck in bad traffic, or had a sick child that needed urgent care. In those cases, you’d expect your employee to get in touch, to let
No, you don’t need one. But there are good reasons why you would want one. As I have explained elsewhere, if you employ staff, you are legally obliged to be a good communicator. You must talk to them. And your work policies, company manuals, and codes of conduct are ways
A crucial element of a fair dismissal is that there are good grounds to dismiss. Employment lawyers like me tend to talk a lot about ensuring you have a fair process. Yet you can have a perfect process and still unfairly dismiss your employee if you didn’t have good reasons
Meetings that are held to discuss whether or not an employee has misbehaved can be tense. The employee, on the one hand, is keen to avoid losing their job or facing any other disciplinary action. On the other hand, just as often, the employer is keen not to put a
Successful employment relationships demand a degree of transparency. In essence, that is what the duty of good faith is all about. But there is some information about ourselves that we prefer to keep private. And there may be some information that you certainly do not want your employer to know
Have you recently been confronted with a report of a staff member misbehaving? What did you do about it? Hopefully, your first inclination was to investigate that allegation fully and fairly. But deciding that an investigation should be carried out is only the first step. The next question is: who
Employees sometimes want to know whether something they have done is worthy of dismissal. Unfortunately, there are no stock answers. Employment law requires an assessment of fairness taking into account all of the circumstances. While it may be fair to dismiss an employee in one case for some particular conduct,
