When it’s time to fire an employee – DSP 65

Terminating an employee isn’t an easy thing to do. How do you know when to have that conversation? Obviously you don’t want to come off too strongly, but there also has to be a line somewhere. Graham and Ashkahn attempt to explain where the line is at for them and their personal philosophy on the subject.

FTS Product – Float Center Employee Handbook (Free)

(Unfortunately we weren’t able to find the saying that Ashkahn was referencing, but we did find this lovely quote from The Princess Bride:

Her heart was a secret garden, and the walls were very high.

–William Goldman, The Princess Bride)

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Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)

Graham: Today’s question is kind of an intense one actually. It’s “how do you know when’s the right time to fire someone?”

Ashkahn: Oh, right.

Graham: I’m bringing this up for pretty obvious reasons here. Ashkahn I know you’ve been with Float On for a long time.

Ashkahn: Okay, well my advice is to never fire anybody.

Graham: This one’s an interesting one. I feel like I mean if you were to hire all of the perfect people theoretically you’d never need to fire anyone right?

Ashkahn: Yes, so just go for that. Just only hire the-

Graham: Perfect people and you’re set.

Ashkahn: This is a weird one because I don’t actually think we’re very good at this.

Graham: Historically we’re-

Ashkahn: Historically, how long did we go before we fired out first-

Graham: 20 years or something.

Ashkahn: It was a really long time.

Graham: It was a really long time.

Ashkahn: We went a really long time before we fired anybody.

Graham: Part of it is that we’re big pushovers I think. I mean we definitely should have fired people probably sooner than we did, and there’s some element of really wanting the people you believe in, who have very good qualities, to push those through and to kind of change over time. I don’t know, didn’t really happen that way as much for us. I believe in people’s abilities to change, but within the context of a work environment maybe you shouldn’t bank on that so much as on their behavior being representative of.

Ashkahn: I don’t know, I mean I still do, I still feel like if somehow we were way better at getting the right things out of people that we could change people who we weren’t able to in the past.

Graham: Well I should say when I say that too, well we’re getting down just a deep tangent rabbit hole, we’ll pull back in a second. I totally believe in giving feedback as a boss and people adjusting their behavior based on that feedback and small things. It’s more like habitual behavior or things that keep coming up. Eventually you just feel like the fool for assuming that the situation’s going to get better when all of the inputs are kind of exactly the same.

Ashkahn: Its tough because it’s not just you that’s suffering having to deal with someone who’s maybe not doing the greatest job. Your other employees are also suffering, which is one of the tough parts. When you run a center people work together and if one person’s not pulling their weight that makes the job harder for the other person. Spite can build up, which is never great and the same thing is true if the person who’s not doing a good job has a really bad attitude, or if someone is all of a sudden become kind of sour to working at your place. That sort of mentality can be really toxic. They can get other people to start to be like, “Yeah, you’re right, this place sucks.” That kind of stuff spreads and is not good for the general morale of people in the shop.

Graham: There was a time where the people that we let go had been with us for several years or something like that and this is the time when maybe we should have let people go sooner and didn’t, and there was some behavioral problems. Now, the last person we fired who had been with us for a while was a long time ago. Now usually when people come on we let them go within a month or within two months if it’s really not working out.

Ashkahn: I guess we’ve been learning some lessons, we’re improving. That’s part of it. When we hire people now we specifically let them know that the first however long, month or two months, I think sometimes we even do three months that they’re working with us, is probationary period.

Graham: A trial period maybe is what I call it.

Ashkahn: Yes trial period, and it’s for them as much as it is us and we let them know it. We’re like, “Hey, you know we’re going to get to know you and get to work with you.”

Graham: We’re going to put this ankle tracker on you, see where you go.

Ashkahn: We’re going watch everything you do. We make it clear that this is as much for them to see if they like working at Float On because that’s not always the case.

Graham: For sure.

Ashkahn: People sometimes come to work at a float center thinking that the job is-

Graham: So relaxing.

Ashkahn: Yes drink tea and chill out.

Graham: Get to talk to people all day long.

Ashkahn: You get there the first day and you’re like, “You got to turn over four tanks in two minutes.”

Graham: Go, go.

Ashkahn: It gets real crazy and there’s a lot of cleaning that people don’t usually quite anticipate. We want to make it clear that if you realize within a week or two of working here that you made a huge mistake and this is not actually the job that you want that you should feel free to leave, no hard feelings. We want you to leave if you don’t think you’re enjoying this that quickly because it’s just going to get worse from there. The job it’s not like cleaning is going to disappear after a few weeks of you being here, anything like that.

Graham: Yes, and its interesting too, we’ve done a lot to get ourselves out of the shop.

Ashkahn: Yes.

Graham: I feel like the more that we’ve done that and kind of taken a back seat almost, the more that the staff themselves have really nailed down the–

Ashkahn: The better everything’s been running. As soon as we got out of there everything just seems to be fine.

Graham: If only the shop were able to come into existence without us, then things would really be smooth.

Ashkahn: There’s something nice about having a really cohesive staff is another good lesson. You’ll see this in different business case studies outside of obviously just float centers or anything. When you’re first starting to hire someone, if you’ve been working the shop yourself or you and one other person, you feel really good about your relationship, don’t immediately go and bring on four other people in order to flush out your shop and actually take all of those hours. Really introducing one person at a time and making sure that they’re coming into the culture. Two people at a time is really good.

I feel like the most discombobulated our shop has been has been when we … It’s already not functioning great and we’re bringing on new people because now those people are learning new bad habits from the staff who have been there before, and the more that your staff is just really solid and works cohesively together, the more that any one new person is introduced starts to fit into that mold and really kind of gets the swing of things. They learn all the good habits about all the nooks to clean rather than the places you can cut corners and stuff like that.

Graham: I think really in terms of knowing when to fire someone-

Ashkahn: Oh yes, the original question. I forgot about that.

Graham: That whole thing. I mean to me it’s like really it’s just you need to have communication happening probably faster than you think. There needs to be feedback going through. You really probably should fire people sooner than you maybe think that you should, but you also really want to have good communication, be clear that’s where things are headed, and give them chances to fix that. You don’t want to get to the point where you’re like, “Man this person’s got to go” and have never had a sit down with them or told them about what you thought they were doing wrong or given them a chance to improve. Sometimes that stuff works and that’s the best.

When you actually talk to someone, you’re like, “Listen, you’re headed down a path that is going to lead to things not going well for you. Here’s what I see as the issues and here’s what I want to bring to your attention.” Then they do turn it around and that’s awesome. That’s ideally what you want to happen in those scenarios. You want to make sure you have that stuff built in. It just comes down to routine check-ins and making sure that you’re actually having these opportunities to, not just talk to people, but hear from them. All that sort of stuff that you get kind of baked into your systems is going to help this process a lot.

Ashkahn: I have much fewer of them, but I have met some center owners around the opposite side where maybe they should wait a little longer before letting someone go. Their turnover is just really high and they’re very demanding, and they have a set way that they want things run. I think they have trouble keeping … Usually it’s for smaller places where they only have one or two staff total, but sometimes it’s really hard keeping those staff on board. Instead of giving feedback the first transgression is they’re out the door.

Again, I feel like in the float world people are a lot nicer generally, so maybe you get that problem less than in corporate America but I’ve definitely still seen the opposite side. For us that’s the advice is definitely trust your instincts a little sooner than we have in the past. I guess there’s a few places that feedback to trust can come from. There’s as an owner you feel like something is off or going wrong. There’s one of your managers or someone who’s kind of more in charge of your shop feeling like something’s not going right. Then there’s also just the staff feeling like something’s wrong with their coworkers or the employee who you just hired, feeling like it’s not going to work out. All of these things can be reasons for that probationary trial period to end a little sooner.

Do trust your instincts. I guess the other thing that I was thinking a little earlier was we have kind of a unique organization, and all of our staff end up being really close friends or at least almost all of them, pretty much all of them. A lot of our staff live together, when they go out they go out to concerts together, we do staff activities, but even if we didn’t do staff activities these would often be the people who they’re grabbing drinks with or spending time with on the weekend. Because it’s almost this family, familial type feel, lot of feelings in there, it becomes really important to vet people early on because after they’ve been with you for a year it does, it feels like they’re one of the team and they’re in the fold, and it becomes that much harder to be really strict with them or to eventually kind of cut that off.

I would say also, if you’re a float center out there who does want that much more close knit kind of community feeling to your staff, be extra strict up front about who you let in to there to begin with. It’s kind of like that old saying of big open heart but giant walls.

Graham: Is that an old saying?

Ashkahn: Yes it’s an old saying.

Graham: Big open heart but giant walls.

Ashkahn: Yes put giant walls around you. I was paraphrasing but it’s definitely a saying.

Graham: All right yes, it doesn’t have that old-

Ashkahn: We’ll put it in the show notes.

Graham: Old time saying sort of look.

Ashkahn: Here ye, here ye. If you have any other questions about firing people don’t ask us, we’re obviously here to be bad at that.

Graham: We shouldn’t have answered this question.

Ashkahn: If you have any other hard questions for us go to floattanksolutions.com/podcast.

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