Separation Notice

The 3 most costly mistakes with problem employees. Separation notice help.

Whether you are firing your problem employee or laying off workers because of downsizing, you must give each worker a formal separation notice. It is a crucial part of the termination process. And while every termination is different, all separation notices should follow a similar format. This is not to say you do not have to tailor each separation notice, you do. But you can use a basic template and change it depending on your circumstances.

What a Separation Notice should contain

First, a separation notice should have basic employee information. You should include the employee's name and social security number. Then list the dates the employee started work and date last worked and the reason that they were separated from employment. Be careful when giving reasons for termination. Get rid of any discriminatory language or unprofessional wording.

You must make sure your employee clearly understands the reasons for the separation. Also you must have documented evidence to support those reasons. If you have collected this information properly, the employee will not be surprised by his or her current predicament. Finally there should be an area for both you and the employee to sign off on the separation notice. This gives you legal evidence the employee knew why you were letting him or her go.

Needing to separate an employee from your company? This is how I terminate.

Facts About FACTA, Or What Does FACTA Mean To You And Your Company

Ever heard of FACTA? Most of us would say “No”. Have you heard that you can get a free credit report? To that we would say, “Yes”. So you have heard of FACTA. But how does that affect me?

FACTA stands for Fair and Accurate Credit Transaction Act. The law went into effect Jan. 1, 2005. FACTA is the law which allows all Americans access to their credit report once per year. So what does that have to do with you?

On June 1, 2005, a new provision of FACTA went into effect. It says that any employer (even if you only employ one person) whose action or inaction results in the loss of employee information, can be fined by federal and state government, and sued in civil court.
Bet you didn't know that. But you need to know, and need to know what you can do to protect yourself.

Small Businesses will be affected the most.

‘"A small businessman who makes a mistake could bear the brunt of a regulation like this," says James Plummer, policy analyst at Consumer Alert, a non-profit group that focuses on a free-market approach to consumer regulations.’

If you don't shred and information gets out, there are penalties. But what if you do shred all potential employee information, and take all necessary precautions to protect your past, current, and future employees’ identities, and the information still gets out somehow? Under FACTA, you could still be held responsible.

You may not think information theft could happen to you, but neither did a lot of companies, universities, government institutions, and businesses that have had employee or customer information stolen from them that have been in the news lately:

Lexis Nexis
University of Northern Colorado
California State University (Chico)
University of California – Berkeley
University of Maryland
Las Vegas Department of Motor Vehicles
Bank of America
Choice Point
Weld County (CO) Employees (information stolen by an inmate while in jail)

How can you, as an employer, minimize your liability?

There are hundreds of things you can do to minimize liability, which are probably things you already do. Document shredding, careful screening of employees who will be coming into contact with personal information of customers and employees, physically locking file drawers with sensitive information, and setting up firewalls on computer equipment connected to the Internet, among hundreds of other solutions, are all good ideas.

As Ben Franklin said, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”, is definitely the case when it comes to securing personal information. However, no matter what prevention steps you take, there is no 100ffective way to be sure that employee’s information won’t be compromised. Even if the information doesn’t get out from your company, an employee can claim that it did.

That's a scary thought! What if an employee claims that their information was stolen through the actions of your company, but there’s no real proof to back it up? You will end up hiring (or using) an attorney to represent and defend you and your company in court. At $200 - $400/hour for most attorneys across the United States, how long can you afford to defend your company?

So what can you do?

One solution that would at least provide an affirmative defense against the fines, fees, and lawsuits you could incur as an employer, is to offer some sort of Identity Theft protection as a benefit to your employees.

As an employer, you can choose whether or not to pay for this added benefit. However, the most important thing you can do is to make the protection available, and have an employee meeting, to help employees understand Identity Theft and the protection that you are making available to them. When you make the protection available, and when your employees have been educated on the dangers of Identity Theft, they can either elect to have identity theft coverage as a benefit, or they can decline the coverage as a benefit.

If the employee has Identity Theft coverage and becomes a victim, it is beneficial to your business, because an employee with Identity Theft coverage will be notified immediately of the theft, spend less time, less money, and will experience less frustration while trying to have their information restored. This will get them back on the job and focused on work more quickly.

If the employee declines the coverage, and later claims that the information was stolen as a result of you or your company’s actions, you have a piece of paper, with their signature, saying that they attended the presentation and declined the coverage.

Choosing to not make Identity Theft coverage available leaves you exposed to an unlimited dollar amount that you can be sued for under civil liability, federal fines of up to $2,500.00 per employee per incident, and state fines of up to $1,000.00 per employee per incident.

Recommended course of action? Have a benefits consultant who offers an Identity Theft protection plan present to your employees. Help them set up a 20 minute presentation with your employees, and make it mandatory that all employees attend. You want your employees to be protected from this awful crime. If they choose not to be, but you’ve given the option of being protected, then the liability becomes theirs, not yours, when they become a victim of identity theft.

Needing to separate an employee from your company? This is how I terminate.

Communication Smoothes the Path of Change

Productivity almost always suffers in times of great change, because employee stress dramatically increases due to the universal fear of the unknown. In these times, communication becomes more important than ever.Often senior executives genuinely believe they are communicating with employees when it comes to matters that affect them. Unfortunately, they often underestimate the number of matters that includes, for the fact is that most high level decisions will affect employees in one way or another. (That's why a new law recently went into effect in Britain forcing employers to answer employees' questions on any changes or decisions that affect them.)So how do you know what is important t. . .