Performance Tracking and Feedback

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager. A reader writes: I recently had to fire a manager for a belligerent, profanity-laden outburst during a board meeting. He has not been doing his job and has been suspected to be drinking or have been drunk while working (although no proof). To further complicate things, his manager has not done his job by documenting the problems and is now pushing me to provide some sort of severance for good will. However, I feel we have a termination with cause for insubordination. What is your suggestion on whether we need to pay severance in this instance? He is talking to a lawyer regarding a possible hostile wor…

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager. A reader writes: In 2020, due to the pandemic, my entire company started to work from home. I enjoyed a much better work-life balance and know many others did too, especially because so many people moved further away for more space. Sadly, we’ve been asked to come back into the office. At first it was a loose mandate, so people did it sparsely. I co-lead our department of 13 people with my boss, and at first we were pretty chill about it. Then the CEO started wanting people in three days a week, minimum. This caused backlash among the departments. We decided to try two days to try to be in the middle…

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager. It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. Our HR person helped her mom get hired in secret I work for a small company of 12 people, led by two partners. In the hierarchy of the company, I am the next tier down from the partners. We are not large enough to have an HR department, so our accountant, “Jan,” operates as the HR person as well as office manager. We have been looking to hire an executive assistant for the company’s partners and Jan has been in charge of placing the ads, screening the resumes, and doing initial interviews. Jan also attended the interviews with the partners and cand…