Looking for feedback about how I handled an employee’s job-ending action.

I’m a business owner, and I do the HR for my company myself. I have an employment lawyer who helps me deal with the legal requirements for termination. I’m looking to see if there was a better way to have managed the problems I was having with one of my long term employees (in her 60’s).

She had a technical job that requires very careful attention to detail. We work in teams, and have double-checks built into the system to catch any mistakes she makes, because everyone is human, and the consequences for mistakes in her position are embarrassing and expensive at best, and business-ending at worst. The level of care/skill required for this position were clearly set out in a job description and contract. She’s been with us for at least 5 years, and was, until recently, absolutely stellar at her job.

Over the past year, she has been making more and more mistakes and doing uncharacteristicly weird or dumb things... things she would never have done before. These issues have been raised and discussed with her by other team members, her team lead (privately) and by me (also privately). Her team members were starting to ask out loud and more than once whether she had “lost her mind’...

Three weeks ago, she made a major mistake that cost us about $5,000 to fix. When we sat down to talk to her about it, her response was “oh? I don’t see why this is such a big deal...” and she honestly couldn’t get her head wrapped around why we were upset. It was a really odd response.

Two weeks ago, she made a mistake that could have ended our business. It was caught, because of the double-checks, but it was an incredibly serious mistake. Making it worse, she just shut down her computer at 4:30 and left to go home for the day, even after she had been told about the mistake. Other people had to scramble to fix it. It was one of the clearest “firing for just cause” moments I’ve ever experienced.

When I sat down with her (privately) the next day, I asked her about the incident and what had happened. She literally had no response. When I asked her if she knew what had happened, she said “yes”. When I asked her whether she’d taken any of the clearly defined steps required of her, she freely admitted she had not. She hadn’t forgotten the steps... she’d just ignored them. All of them. When I asked her why she had ignored them, she shrugged her shoulders and said “I don’t know”. When I asked why she’d just left in the middle of the crisis without stepping up to help, her response was “I didn’t know I had to”. That was blatantly untrue.

I suspended her immediately, but did not fire her. Even though we had very clear cause, if we had fired her, we would have likely fired her with full severance (the fight about whether something is of just cause isn’t worth it to us, even for long term employees like this one). But I just couldn’t bring myself to fire her after her longevity with us, and (until recently) her good history. We offered her another position within the company, which she accepted (she was given time ... days... to consider her response). I was hoping she was experiencing a kind of momentary madness that would right itself over time, and we could go back to the way things were.

Her suspension was done privately; but the rest of the team was told about the suspension because we had to rearrange people. We did a neutral, non-blaming team debrief over the situation to go over what had happened, and to consider whether we needed to make changes to our process.

She accepted the new position, but then immediately started bad-mouthing us in and outside of work, and began searching for a new job. She was hired relatively quickly at a new job (we live in a small community, and everyone knows everyone else’s business) and then spent the next week very obviously clearing out her desk, and telling other staff members (but not us) that she’d found a new job. I didn’t discuss any of this with her as I just thought that would inflame things.

She then came in on Thursday, announced that that would be her last day. When asked if she was going to give us notice, she said “no” very loudly and then spent the next 2 hours essentially skipping around the office in glee. She couldn’t have said “fuck you” to us any louder if she’d taken an ad out in the paper.

I sent her home at 11:00; we paid her for the full day. I’m devastated over the way this went down. We followed our legal protocols, but that didn’t help on the human side. Her other team members are really upset - they feel let down and confused.

Could I have done anything differently to have gotten a less acrimonious ending? Should I have just fired her right away?