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It's Not Always as Easy as Donald Trump's "You're Fired!"

A well-known purchased service, in addition to those provided by a virtual assistant, is human resources. Are you the owner - or do you have an office manager - who also does the payroll and “HR stuff”? Small and medium-sized businesses owners must consider the laws regarding employment. You have to be extremely careful when terminating someone, even though Indiana is a right-to-work state. Should your employee(s) be paid hourly or on a salary? Do you have to pay overtime? Are you up on all the latest changes that seem to occur on a constant basis?

An HR consultant is a must if you don’t have a human resources professional on staff. There are many companies who act as your HR Department. A couple companies I recommend are HR Alternative Consulting and C & S Consulting. They, and other similar companies, provide all the necessary paperwork, procedures and most important, knowledge. You’ll have a professional who will consult with you or actually do the hiring and terminations for you. They will also keep you current on employment law and basically keep you out of the courtroom! Most will provide project-based or retainer-based contracts.

Business owners (I am one, so I know this) often think they can handle everything. So as a fellow small business owner (even if you have only 1 employee), I strongly encourage you to consult with an HR professional on a regular basis. They will become an integral member of your business professional advisors.

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Comment by Tom Marsh on September 5, 2009 at 2:11pm: Employee termination is tricky, especially if you have a one-person (or no-person) IT department to lock the terminated employee out of your network and systems, a topic I covered a few months back in my blog.

Giving your IT Department advanced warning should not (generally) be considered a "good idea"--it should be considered a non-negotiable requirement, especially if the person being fired has access to sensitive data! Even a few hours or minutes of access after-termination could allow a disgruntled ex-employee to raid your customer-list, business strategies, or on-line banking accounts... Really, any piece of data they had access to as an employee, if somebody hasn't actively taken steps to disable that access, they still have it after termination FOREVER until somebody turns it off--in a lot of cases, physical access to your business wouldn't be required to use these "uncontrolled credentials" against you.

If the person being terminated is your entire IT Department this takes a little more planning--and the involvement of somebody with technical skills from outside your organization to get a handle on the situation before you pull-the-trigger. What you don't want to do is terminate the person without any understanding of what their job-role is, what they do, or how they do it. For System and Network administrators this means passwords and documentation.

If this is a situation you think you might encounter in the near future, feel free to drop me a line.