Case Study: Employment Law

Video Transcript

As I said earlier, for employer clients, success is often avoiding litigation. So, recently within the last couple of weeks, I had a call from a client and they were prepared to let an employee go. The employee had been working there for a long time and was just kind of the performance was ticking downward and downward, and they’d gotten tired of dealing with the employee. They tried coaching. They tried everything to bring the employee along. And when they called me and said, “Here’s what we’re going to do,” I started asking a few questions. The typical questions that I would ask for an employer in that situation are the employee a member of a protected class, any one of the any 15 different protected classes in Minnesota, has the employee recently had a health issue that has been brought to your attention, have you gone through with a performance review and a performance improvement plan process, and without going into too much detail, through that process, we were able to determine that there was really a potential problem here if they were just going to let the employee go at that point in time.

So, instead of effecting the termination at that point, what we did was we put together a plan to provide to the employee a performance improvement plan that was reasonable, it had objective criteria that the employee could reach, and then I suggested presenting them with a plan and just say, “You know, if this isn’t something that you really want to do, or you don’t think that you can do, we can talk about a negotiated severance that might be attractive to you.” And that’s what they did, and sure enough, the employee bit because the employee wanted to leave, but they didn’t want to leave with anything, and they didn’t want to leave without the ability to apply for unemployment compensation until they were able to find a new position.

So, that’s really a success story for everybody, for both the employer and for the employee, because the employer was able to move on with their business without the problems of dealing with this employee on a day-to-day basis, and the employee got what she wanted in the end. She wanted to not be there anymore, and she wanted to have a little bit of security so that she could move on to her next employment. Over the years, the need for highly competent Employment Law services has increased dramatically, both for businesses and for executives alike. Avisen Legal brings a depth of experience, knowledge, and wisdom to employment law matters.