In every business or organisation, you must employ staff to make sure it runs smoothly and reaches all its goals and objectives. After employing individuals either on permanent or contractual terms, it may not be an automatic assurance to maintain those workers. You may dismiss some due to gross misconduct or other reasons that will culminate in employee layoff. So what is unfair dismissal? It is a situation when businesses or organisations dismiss workers without genuine reasons.
For you to terminate your employee, you must have tangible reasons to protect you from an employment tribunal. If it is determined that your dismissal was unfair, you might end up draining your pockets in compensation. To avoid such incidents, you should use the right procedures to dismiss an employee.
Reasons to dismiss an employee
It would help if you dismissed your workers fairly, here are some genuine reasons to dismiss an employee:
- If your employee cannot execute given roles
- In case of redundancy; if the job is no longer necessary.
- If statutory duty rises,
- If an employee misconducts
For an employee to make claims on unfair dismissal, they should have worked for at least two years with the business or the organisation. Business firing employees for the following reasons is automatically unfair:
- Maternity or paternity leave.
- Adoption leave for your employee.
- Shared parental leave is necessary for your employee.
- If employees try to enforce their right to receive the minimum wage, a government policy on salaries and remuneration
- If employees exposed wrongdoing in your workplace.
If your employee takes claims to an employment tribunal, and the process concludes that the dismissal was unfair, you may chip into your incomes to make compensation for the all-year salary. Amount to compensate depends on whether the case was due to health or safety reasons, despite the worker’s time on your premises.
It may help if you did not dismiss someone on probation because the employee in such a condition should have time to improve performance. With time, someone may gain experience and stand out in performance.
There are some contractual rights during employment from the first day that both employer and employee should immediately sign and commence.
What should you do to protect your company?
For you to protect your company and ensure employees get fair treatment, you should make sure you:
- Provide your staff with copies of all policies and procedures to follow during working hours.
- It may help if you make notes of all actions taken by an employment tribunal.
- You should keep all copies of the messages.
- Let employees be aware of company rules and regulations all the time. You should consult widely before concluding dismissing an employee and trying to solve issues correctly, by following disciplinary procedures. Here are the steps you should follow:
- Have informed talks with your employee, this may allow room for improvement in their performance or code of conduct.
- Hold a thorough investigation to enable you to establish real facts.
- Make sure you have a disciplinary hearing.
- It would help if you made decisions based on your investigation.
- Allow your employees to appeal the decisions after warnings if they don’t show any sign of conduct improvement. It gives you room to take different disciplinary procedures to make more severe sanctions.
- You can dismiss an employee after failing to improve; this gives you specific protection against claims made for unfair dismissal.
See an unfair dismissal lawyer in Gold Coast to help you.
