Fire my assistant now! Enlist HR early on if you have an under-performing employee. (Supervisor Resources).

If HR professionals had a nickel for every time they were blindsided by a manager who wanted an employee fired, HR would be the best-compensated discipline in corporate America. Unfortunately managers often avoid HR at all costs and only come to visit the folks in "Personnel" when a crisis happens.

Welcome to the world of employee relations. As you can imagine, there's a lot that goes into terminating employees for cause, and when your HR department is blind-sided by such "requests in a vacuum," it can place HR at odds with line management. Ideally, HR should be in a situation to aid line managers when substandard job performers get in the way of maximizing a department's productivity. But alas, that's only management theory in most cases. More often than not, HR has to attempt to "build a paper case" to justify the termination during a crisis, and it's usually an under-performing employee's inflated performance reviews that preclude a termination for cause. Whose fault is that? You guessed it--the supervisor.

At-Will Employment

Why is it so hard to terminate? After all, employees can leave the company anytime they want. Why can't companies leave employees the same way? Unfortunately, at-will employment isn't all it's cracked up to be. Line managers assume that if employees signed at-will employment agreements, then their employment really should be "at whim." In reality, at-will employment is misunderstood, so let's clarify what it means and what it doesn't mean.

Employees often are asked to sign employment-at-will agreements in job applications, offer letters or employee handbooks or freestanding at-will agreements placed into their personnel files. Such agreements help defense lawyers win immediate dismissals (known as "summary judgments") in court. That's the sole purpose of an "at-will affirmative defense," and if summary judgment isn't won, then the employer must defend the case on its merits. If that happens, it means you will need to show, in most cases, that the ex-employee was accorded workplace due process in the form of progressive discipline. Most judges and arbitrators will reason that "if it isn't written down, it never occurred." As a result, companies need to provide progressive discipline in the form of written warnings or substandard performance reviews even when workers are employed at will.