So what do you do when your employee works in another state, at his home, and you’ve decided to end his employment? How can you tactfully and sensitively communicate this message? This is the question one of my clients faced this month.
The manager was going to take two days to drive to the employee’s area of residence, take the person out for a meal and terminate the employee at that time. She couldn’t meet at the person’s home office and do the termination. And she didn’t want to do it over the phone. So the next best option was at their regular off-site restaurant meeting place.
Of course, this decision just didn’t sit right. Imagine being terminated in a public setting where you feel that everyone is watching your reaction!
This circumstance is really not that uncommon. I’ve had lots of clients who conduct their employees’ performance appraisals at restaurants. “Let’s go out and celebrate your review! What’s your favorite restaurant?” And then the lunchtime discussion focuses on the employee’s performance.
This is fine, as long as you’re not sharing lots of constructive feedback. I surely wouldn’t want my “weaknesses” or “opportunities” shared in public with the people dining at the next table overhearing.
So that means that you only take your top performers out to lunch for their review. And your struggling performers know that their review isn’t good because their performance review meeting is in your office and not at a restaurant.
In these more informal times and with more remote workers, we need to determine in advance how are we going to effectively handle the easy and the difficult communication. We need to strategize this in advance and plan the communication with the employee when we set up the remote relationship. Of course, the same concerns and protocol need to be established with the employees sitting next to you.
So what did the client do? We bounced ideas back and forth. One of the ideas we came up with was to rent a conference room at a hotel or business center and conduct the meeting there. That allowed the privacy that would be needed for the discussion. They ended up utilizing their teleconferencing capability and had the meeting computer-to-computer but with a face-to-face dialogue. This was one of their usual forms of communication, so although it sounds like the George Clooney movie “Up in the Air,” it was one of their normal methods of communication and it worked for them.
Based on your knowledge of each individual employee, determine what setting works best for him/her so you can really get your message across. Communication isn’t always a one-size-fits-all process. As managers and business owners, it’s our responsibility to focus on the tone of the setting as well as the message we’re communicating.
Copyright (c) 2010 Arlene Vernon, HRx, Inc.
