Flickr Photo by: Evan

Yesterday my son had to fire an employee, let's call him Joe, from his phonescreen repair business because he was a bad employee. It's never pleasant to let an employee go, even more so when the employee pretends that he did nothing wrong and gets an attitude about the matter. Joe went on social media raging against my son for being fired as if he were a competent, reliable employee innocent of any wrong-doing.

Let me cover some of his sins:

• Very Tardy - Normally we open at 10 am but Joe complained about car traffic at that hour and so we let him come in at 11am. Despite this accommodation Joe still arrived late more than ⅔ of the time.


• Overly Absent - in the past 6 months Joe didn't show up for work at all 22% of the time.


• AWOL - On the days that he did show up, he was away from his kiosk hours at a time to go eat or do something else. We received many phone complaints from customers who could not get their phones fixed at times he was supposed to be there.
  


• Incompetent - Joe has racked up more mistakes repairing customers' phones than any other employee. We attribute his mistakes to his lack of passion for the job.


• Unproductive - Of all our employees, Joe produces the least amount of sales. In the month before we fired him, Joe had $900 in repair sales for the entire 30 days - an amount that our other locations do in less than two days. Interestingly, on the first day that we replaced him with a new employee, we did more than $500.00 in repairs.
  
• Inattentive to Customers - Again, complaints from customers that he was too busy doing something else to help fix their phones. It seems Joe was fixing customers' computers for his own business. Which explains his low productivity.


• Untrustworthy - Obviously.

So what took so long to fire him? Two things:

1. Our litigious society. We gave him warning about his tardiness and absences and bad work habits 90 days ago. Ditto 60 days. Ditto 30 days ago. Otherwise, without documented warnings, we would expect some labor board somewhere to determine that we fired him without good cause.


2. My son really hates firing anyone and feels everyone should be given time to fix their problems. But sometimes you just cannot take anymore abuse.