Terminations can be uncomfortable experiences for all involved
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Terminations can be uncomfortable experiences for all involved – both the employee being fired and the HR leader doing the firing.
According to a report from SHRM, Tuesdays are the preferred day to fire a worker, following a LinkedIn discussion between HRDs; with the majority of them agreeing the meeting should be no more than 15 minutes long.
And whilst this formula may work for the majority of firings, some cases are just too individual to apply a one-size-fits-all approach.
Employees revealed the strangest reasons they were fired from past jobs via the secret sharing app Whisper.
One employee revealed they were terminated for “not doing cocaine with [their] boss” at the tattoo parlor where they worked, whilst another lost their job after they started to gain weight.
One potty-mouthed employee was terminated after they swore at a dog, another to make room for the manager’s wife and one unlucky worker lost their job for going to the bathroom too often.
And whilst many of the reasons listed are seem funny in their peculiarity, others demonstrate a clear aberration for any HR regulations.
One woman explained how she was fired for having postpartum depression after the birth of their son. She claims she told her boss, who terminated her contract the very same day.
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Knowing when you can and cannot fire an employee is an essential part of understating the employment law aspect of a HR leader’s role. We recently caught up with Shana French, lawyer at Sherrard Kuzz LLP, who revealed when you can terminate a worker for an offensive body odour.
She referenced a case dealing with an employee in a warehouse, who was guilty of spitting and passing gas repeatedly in front of colleagues.
“The employee claimed that he was fired because of his bad body odour, which was caused by a medical condition,” added French. “However, the employee did not disclose his medical ailment to his employer, despite the organization giving him repeated opportunities to do so. From the Human Rights Tribunal’s perspective, the decision to terminate was upheld as being unrelated to the protective ground, because the employee had separate performance issues.”