Hey, it's Samantha Hartley of the Profitable Joyful Consulting podcast. This season is about consulting advice, and recently I've been giving the advice you should fire that person. So today I wanted to talk about what we do if we're in a situation where we have someone who needs to be let go, how you discern when, how to do that, why and probably make the process easier for you, less painful for you, and hopefully for all involved so that you can get back to growing your profitable and joyful business.

So the situation we've had lately, two virtual assistants, one full time employee. And in every case, they're not performing up to expectations, in some cases it's a longtime person who has suddenly either gotten to the edge of their competencies or has it's finally been revealed that all this time they actually did not know what they were doing. So this is basically the things that we covered and how we handle them.

I want to just make a disclaimer that this is not legal advice, this is not about legally firing someone in human resources or in your state or country, according to the law, because I have been in countries where you can't just fire somebody that easily and I've worked at companies where its firing is a long complicated process. So this is not about that, this is about conceptually, when is the time to let someone go?

The other thing that I want to disclaim is I'm not talking about a certain kind of really bad behavior. You should fire people immediately when they are inappropriate, you know, they do something unethical, they're on drugs, they're you know, harassing other people or bullying, like, those are unprofessional situations and that's like this isn't even about that, people should be acting professionally. The other thing is, if they're like toxic and just having them around, they have a crappy attitude and it tends to infect other people who are working. That shouldn't be a difficult decision for you to make.

The third thing, and I bring this up to me, this is a non negotiable because I work with virtual people is when people go dark or they disappear. If someone cannot reliably show up for work, it's way too stressful to work with people like that when they are virtual like, it would be fine if we were in an office and I could I don't know, I would just drive out of the house I'm not sure what I would do, but that wouldn't be fine either. But definitely with virtual employees, I thing that drives me crazy is when someone just goes dark and you don't hear from them and they don't respond to any communications, that to me is immediate dismissal because we're not going to able to work with someone like that because we can't rely on them to show up. So in those situations, you know, get out of here, I'm talking about when you have somebody who is like the potential was so good and now for some reason, they're letting us down.

So why do sometimes people get wait to fire people? So one of the first things I think that no one else knows how to do what that person is doing. And so the whole organization is kind of held hostage by this one person who has all of this institutional knowledge and I have seen this with offline businesses, there's like the bookkeeper who hoards everything and nobody else knows what the numbers are and she has like all of this weird power, those people have to go. So if you have somebody who in your organization who like knows the tech stuff or has all the passwords to the website and all of the knows the background of where everything is registered and hosted and blah, blah, blah, you have to extract that information from that person because it's dangerous for any knowledge to be inside of one single human. They could get hit by a bus, any bad thing could happen, we want to make sure that that knowledge like that is in a central place.

The other thing is, if very often people wait, especially owners wait to fire someone because they know that if I let that person go, then I have to do that work, like there isn't somebody else who could take that work over and this is another opportunity, which, by the way, I work with my clients on is you have to build it within your organization, the capability to to grow and you can't be the person who if somebody doesn't show up for work, you have to run and do that job. So, for example, in my business, we have you know, there's 10 or 12 freelancers, everybody's virtual and freelance and my business, except for me, I'm here in real life and I'm also full time. But for my whole team, what I like to have is what I call bench depth.

So if there's one person here and they want to take a vacation, for example, then there's somebody behind them who shows up and will do their work for that week. So it might be making social posts or writing or doing tech things, there's somebody who also can substitute for that. And in rare cases, that person is me but almost always it's someone from my team of 12 and they, you know, intersperse and change things around, so everybody can always take a vacation without everything breaking down and the whole business having to go on hold. And if for some reason anybody ever left or we had to let them go, that knowledge of what they do is within others in the organization on the team.

So if you are stuck because and can't let someone go because they know how to do the thing or they were hired to take something off your plate, now your plate is full again, then first of all, we should talk because that's something I can help you to do, because you cannot grow to two million if you are that much in the weeds of the organization and the other thing is that work needs to be dispersed better among people.

So another reason that people don't let people go when it's time to that owners don't fire people when they need to is that they feel bad. So I feel bad doing that, I feel bad for her family, I feel bad for her, it feels mean, she's nice, I like her, you know, all these things like this. And what I have to say is you have to be so committed to your mission and to your business that that feeling we don't have, I want you to feel compassionate but you cannot put the whole business on hold and put your mission on hold because of one person and their feelings, especially if they're not up to snuff, walking up to snuff.

And the last thing is a lot of times you just don't know what to say, so I'm going to give you a little language with this but please don't again avoid having a difficult conversation or taking a difficult action because of reasons like that, like really reach out and get help. And again, look to what your mission is and think about your clients and the potential clients you have, you're here to serve, you're here to lead and you can't be constricted by one person who is not working out in your business. So that is a question that I ask you.

Years ago, there was this column, maybe it's still ongoing in magazines called ‘Can This Marriage Be Saved’ and basically they would always describe this marriage in the situation and I would read it and I would be like, oh, I got to get divorced. And then they would go through some counseling and sometimes I'd actually more often than not, it seems to me it worked out and I'd be like, that's crazy it seemed like this was a lost cause but then they worked on it and it worked out and they were actually able to stay together. That, I think, is the situation, sometimes when you feel like I've got to fire this person, do you really? The number one question I want you to ask yourself about this is, did you on board train and support them fully so that they could do their job right the way you want it done? Very often what happens with consultants is that they bring someone in and they're deep experts in the thing and they bring someone in and they have super high expectations and they kind of give them like two or three instructions and then they throw them over, the side of the boat and expect them to swim and when that doesn't happen, they're like, oh, see, I knew I couldn't trust anybody else to do things, I have to do everything myself, Oh, nobody else can do it but me, I'm the only one I can rely on. And all these other self sabotaging beliefs, those beliefs are things that keep you small. So we bring on people who either will let us down, which we could tell in the job interview, or we don't support them fully and then when they let us down, we act like we're surprised when really that's just a sabotage strategy. So I want you to be sure that you are fully supporting and training people when you bring them on before you fire them, because it is expensive and terrible to have to let someone go and find somebody else. So if you can save them, do.

Another question you can ask yourself and find out if they're savable is, are they clear on their KPIs? KPIs or key performance indicators? Do they know what you want them to do? Like they should have goals and specific metrics that you are assessing them for and not just you're assessing them for, but they can assess themselves for a client who's struggling with a sales and marketing person and my question is, does she know what she's supposed to be doing every single week? Because if she did, she would know she's not performing. So somewhere here, we're either not looking at our metrics or we're pretending that there aren't any metrics or there are metrics and we're pretending that we can't see what they really are because she's clearly not performing and there's kind of no conversation about what's going on here, this situation could be improved if we said, let me remind you what the KPIs for this position are and what can you be doing in the next six weeks to improve your numbers here from zero, by the way, let's work on that.

So if you have somebody who is supposed to, let's say, be writing five articles a week, are they writing five articles a week or getting things done on deadline? And you notice that there's a trend in Asthana that she's always late with what she's doing. You can objectively assess whether someone is meeting the requirements of the job and I think that is a really important thing to do. So it's not you saying, hey, I just didn't really like the way you did it, you can be saying, hey, you and I can both see that these are the goals and you're not meeting them.

The third question that I want you to think about is, do they seem committed to making it work? All things being equal, so hey, they're falling behind or they're not performing that how you want, do you feel like they are sincerely making an effort and they have a positive attitude and they are really trying to change their behaviors and improve the situation? If that's the case, a lot of times, you know, there may be hope and you may be able to get in and then again, give them a lot more support and a lot more training than you thought they were going to need and maybe that's unexpected and maybe that's, you know, problematic and you didn't want to do that but again, if you invest up front in that training and get them up to the level that you want them at long term, you're going to be very happy with that person. So I always look at do they seem like they really want to make it work? A lot of times you will find that they, in cases especially of long time employees, what may have happened is they get to the edge of their skills and they realize they're not no longer really qualified for the job or the job has morphed or they have just like tried their hardest, the longest they could, and now they're not not performing well anymore. Sometimes they just kind of age out of a position in terms of like, effort and attitude. And you just don't feel like they want to be there anymore and when you feel like someone doesn't want to be there anymore, they don't want to be there anymore and that's a really good time to let them go. So I think if you look at those clues, then it'll let you know, have you sincerely done all you could to help that person succeed in the position?

So if we do decide that we need to fire them, the thing that I want you to do, these are the actions that I'd like you to take. The first thing is to assess the situation honestly again, hiring and training someone is a lot of effort, replacing someone is a drag, especially when you spent all that time and invested all that time and energy in another person. You're going to lose the money you have invested and the time, the effort you made for training, the learning that they had, all of that knowledge that they have and also the potential productivity while you're finding someone else and replacing them. This is why people say hire slow and fire fast, the longer you wait to let go of a terrible fit person, the worse you know, the more you waste. So but I do want you to access it honestly and say, have I done everything that I could do if you decide to keep them as I mentioned, it is key for you to over communicate, over train just like completely put that to, I mean, literally like two to four hours a day side by side, giving them exactly what you want them to do, teaching them to do that and watching them do that until you they can do it without training wheels, they can take the training wheels off and be successful.

I like to document this, so I document the expectations, here's how I expect this to be done, I document the work, here's the step by step process, I think of things as S.O.P.s are what we have in our business standard operating procedures and I kind of think of them as like a recipe like if you're going to make a wedding cake, here's what you do, step one, step two, step three and then you put this away and then you take this out. Like that kind of level of detail is how every single task in your business that is repeated should be documented and we use loom, so loom video is a great way to you can record the screen, you can record yourself, but you can especially in screen recordings, you can take people through the step by step process. So if you, for example, are, you know, writing a post and then formatting it and then posting it on your blog with a photo, somebody could take through that entire process on a Loom video so that they go, oh, now I know how to do that and again, if someone can watch that video five times and not know how to do it, they're probably not a fit for that position.

And what if you then do decide to fire them? So we've done all of this work you decide they're not a fit. They didn't get better, I gave them chances and all of that. I think it's really important for you to prepare yourself before you do that, so that means get from them, take back from them anything that they know that no one else knows, interview them about how they do things, what they've done, where things are obviously, you're going to take back passwords, anything that's client secure all of those kinds of things. So be ready for them to go have somebody who else who can step in, ideally who isn't you to do that work when they go. And then I want you to prepare yourself for a grown up conversation, this is a time when I think it's important to have a face to face, they're going to be rarely are they going to be surprised to be fired, almost everyone I know has suspects they are not doing well in their job when they're in this kind of situation, they suspect that things are not good sometimes they can they can be surprised that it got so far is to have them be fired. But in general, I want you to have a face to face or phone conversation so either a Zoom or a phone conversation with them.

I think it's less professional to do this by email or text and just say, I want you to be firm and just say whatever is the nicest possible thing you can say to them, hey, I think you have a really great attitude and you seem really gung ho and then I don't think we're a fit for working together and I'm going to go ahead and discontinue your contract. So if they're on Upwork or Freeup or wherever, you can just close down that contract. If you can be as honorable and generous as you can be in that, I would say maybe give them a kind of a closing bonus, a week's notice with a week's pay, whatever you feel like is fair and honorable, and when I write a recommendation, what I will generally do is, in very kind language, allude to the things that didn't really work out.

So, for example, if they were constantly no showing, I would very politely say we had some challenges around, you know, meeting or connecting at the same time or him appearing and doing the work or maybe there are some issues with absences. So I just try to keep that language very neutral because I don't want to destroy someone's career and life, I just want them to not work in my business anymore. So I do think that that conversation is important to have as I said, I think usually they will not be surprised to hear that and everybody can part on good terms. You've heard me say already ten times on this podcast, ‘Do not burn bridges’ I'm not a fan of burning bridges with major corporations and I'm not a fan of doing it with individuals either, even though it didn't work out, I believe that they probably did their best maybe there are extenuating circumstances, in any case, they probably are a good person, so I like to just be honorable and generous with them.

Now, back to you, it is important to me that you honor your mission and your work and you can't have someone who is not lifting you up every single day when they're working with you. So if you've been struggling to let someone go, I really want this to be the spark that helps you to say I'm either going to greatly step up and support them much more so that they can perform up to my expectations or I'm going to do so much more clearly, communicate what those expectations are so that they can meet them in a way that is objective. They'll know if they are meeting them or letting me down, they'll know what they need to do to improve. And if you feel like there's somebody that you have right now that you have to let go, I hope that this gives you the spark and the courage to do so. And with that, I wish you a profitable and joyful consulting business.