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The Oddest Places I’ve Ever Had to Fire Someone
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It didn’t escape me that University of Southern California head football coach Lane Kiffin was fired during the early hours of a recent Sunday morning in a private room at the airport.
Kiffin and the USC team were just returning from a 62-41 loss at Arizona State, and Athletic Director Pat Haden thought the best thing to do was fire him at the airport.
An airport seems like an odd place to perform a termination of a Division 1 Football coach. I mean, why fire him at the airport? Why not bring him into the AD’s office the next day or that evening and have that conversation? Then you can make sure you have all of your paperwork and have talked through everything with your legal team.
It wasn’t that I was surprised by the coach’s firing. Being in the HR field for 20 years, I’ve had my share of odd places to fire people. For the most part, you can call an employee into their bosses’ office, an HR conference room, or just about anywhere to be fired.
The tricky ones are when you’re dealing with an employee who is off site, a remote worker, or the supervisor and worker reside at different locations. Sometimes leadership termination locations can be tricky as well.
I started to think about some of the odd places I’ve had to terminate an individual. Here’s the top four (4) I could come up with:
Yep, right there in the front seat of my Hyundai. I was a Regional HR Manager and was mostly on the road working out of my car.
I once had to fire a manager in my car. From a spacial standpoint, it was a little uncomfortable. Think about any serious conversation you’ve ever had in a car. You have to turn sideways, and you’re only inches from the other person.
No, it wasn’t in the bathroom! But afterwards, I joked with an HR co-worker of mine that “I got busy in a Burger King bathroom” doing HR (Digital Underground shout out!).
Many times we don’t want to terminate someone on site at your own work location, so you set up some elaborate scheme to get them off site and terminate them there. The problem is, you’re in a public location! You might have the best intentions and you show up at 10 am at your local Burger King just as they have a class field trip going through and learning about the new “Satisfries!”
It’s recipe for disaster, but everyone I know in HR has at some point made the decision to go off site to terminate someone!
Starbucks might actually be the official SHRM location for terminations!
Starbucks should sell official naming rights for a termination spot, because nothing says “termination” like a nondescript meeting at Starbucks on a Friday afternoon around 3 pm.
Coffee shops in general are great firing locations. They’re quiet, you don’t have to buy anything if you don’t want, and it seems semi-plausible that you might actually just meet an employee there to discuss work stuff.
When you work in restaurants, sometimes the only private place you have is the walk-in cooler and/or freezer. The freezer works best for two reasons:
So, what about it HR Pros? Give me your very best and worst locations for terminations that you’ve ever had to use.
This was originally published on Tim Sackett’s blog, The Tim Sackett Project.