Dealing with the Complication of Firing an Employee Whose Spouse is Newly Hired
A reader writes:
One of my staff is about to be fired for grossly inadequate performance. I’m confident that we’re on safe legal ground with the firing, and her performance issues have been documented and addressed with no improvement.
However, the complication is that we have just hired her husband to work within the same team. (I’m aware that hiring couples isn’t ideal even when nobody is getting fired. However, we’re in a small town and had a very limited pool of candidates to choose from.)
How can we best handle this to minimize fall-out within the team, and avoid causing more pain than is necessary for both members of the couple?
I address this question over at Inc. today, where I’m revisiting letters that have been buried in the archives here from years ago (and sometimes updating/expanding my answers to them). You can read it here.
