According to ERISA (another federal law on retirement benefits), you can't lay off a worker to stop her from getting a retirement benefit. If you do choose to go down this path, you must inform the jobholder that this will happen. Lastly, you must provide substantiation that your decision to sack the worker happened before finding out that she was pregnant. In such a situation how do you make sure that your lay off letter is employee foolproof? Be aware that worker gross misconduct can severely damage the small business. In this chapter's case study, you learned how to write a "Final Written warning" on our alcoholic and lazy office administrator. If the drug or alcohol abuse while on-the-job causes the gross misconduct, then the obvious solution would be to terminate the jobholder. 1) Not knowing your risk of suit. A place to start looking for a firm legal counselor is www.bestlawyers.com. After finding out the firing risk, you follow these standards for each level: * The worker will regard all items in the workplace as property of the company. It is far better to be safe than sorry when dealing with potentially poor-performing personnel.

If you didn't use categories, but instead used the infractions, the worker would only have 2 verbal warnings. It'll only take you 30 to 90 days to document poor performance with escalating discipline, which is a short time. But knowing how to lay off someone properly is important to the future success of your small company.