John Campbell "Employee Discipline and Termination"

We had another great guest speaker come to class this week! I’m starting to realize that everyone in HR is really good at speaking. His name is John Campbell and his discussion was about employee discipline and termination.
It’s not any fun to judge your co-workers as their boss. This leads to a lot of people failing. Firing someone is like capital punishment in the business world. Campbell had another student come up to the front of the class and they did a role play. The student was with Human Resources and Campbell was a supervisor. He came to HR with hopes to fire an employee. The student was supposed to help solve the supervisor’s concern about the employee. The student did so well. She helped the supervisor realize that firing the employee is jumping to conclusions without talking to him or her about changing.
He talked about Sexual Harassment and said that he deals with it so often. Most people do stupid things that require HR help to stop sexual harassment problems. He gave a list of ways to approach sexual harassment. It starts with doing nothing and on the other side of the list, the last straw, is termination. Options that are in the middle of the two are as follows; verbal discussion, verbal discussion with writing, verbal discussion with writing and put it in the file, ask them to leave for the day with pay, and suspension without pay.
The thing I liked most about what he said is that with HR he tries to be a couch and not step on other people’s toes. When someone comes in for advice he helps them see what the possibilities are instead of telling them what to do or not to do.
Like I said, I really like listening to John and I learned a lot. I also think that discipline and termination isn’t as intimidating as I use to think it was.