Geoff:'How has your morning been?'
Dave:'Very busy. It never stops! I have a few things to update you on. Are you available now?'
Geoff:'Go ahead.'
Dave:'First of all, Susan from marketing wants to terminate the contract of one of her team?'
Geoff:'For what reason?'
Dave:'For both his level of attendance, he has being missing a lot of days from work, and his overall work quality. She was wondering if this gave us the grounds, the justification to be able to fire him.'
Geoff:'You need to make sure that he's been given by his manager first a verbal warning. But more importantly, he needs to have then been given an official or written warning. Without either of these, we can't do anything.'
Dave:'She said he has had both.'
Geoff:'OK, get signed copies of both. Also, we need a copy of his last performance appraisal. Hopefully, his manager has written something about the problems there. Remember, if we don't follow the legal procedures, he may be able to complain of unfair dismissal, and argue that he was fired because of ethnicity or religion rather than because of his work. And if it does goes to an employment tribunal, we need to make sure we did everything correctly.
Can you also calculate what his severance pay will be. Remember, we have to pay him for any outstanding days of holiday he still has.'
Dave:'I'll take care of it.'
Geoff:'Ah, there's something I need to talk to you about. I've just had it confirmed that because of the crisis, in June we're going to make redundant 40 staff. The Chief Executive Officer wants to lower costs. Also, there will from now be no new staff recruitment.'
Dave:'What, we're going to lay off 40 people. My god! What has the union said about it?'
Geoff:'At the moment, the union doesn't know anything about it. But I'm sure they have suspected that something like this would happen. We'll inform them in the next couple of days and start negotiations to finalise the details by the end of the month. But before that, we'll have to do a proposal on what the redundancy package will be. The longer they've worked here, the more money they will get. So, we're going to be a lot busier here in human resources I'm afraid.'