Abstract
Teaching students how to terminate an employee in a safe, legal, and humane manner provides them with a valuable management skill. This article describes an exercise for teaching students how to conduct termination meetings, guiding them through the process of creating a termination script that is consistent with best practices from the literature. This exercise also helps students develop confidence and enhance their skills by role-playing the termination meeting and responding to the interpersonal challenges of such meetings.
Keywords
Terminating (a.k.a. dismissing, discharging, or firing) individual employees fordisciplinary or performance problems is a notoriously difficult task for managers. A poorly executed termination can result in a lawsuit or a charge of discrimination (Lind et al., 2000). A discharged employee may also respond aggressively (Karl & Hancock, 1999), adding to the 6% of the U.S. workforce experiencing workplace violence each year (Schat et al., 2006). Nevertheless, dismissals are a common personnel action, with U.S. businesses having laid off or discharged approximately 21.9 million workers in 2018 (Essien & McCarthy, 2019). There is clearly a need for management educators to train students on how to conduct effective employee dismissals. The exercise described below provides students with an opportunity to improve their management skills by asking them to create a termination script and role-play a simulated termination meeting. Although this exercise was developed for upper-level undergraduate students in traditional (in-person) courses, it can easily be adjusted to fit online coursework and other student populations.
Expert Opinion on Employee Termination
Most of the literature on employee terminations is prescriptive, primarily focused on minimizing legal liability (Wood & Karau, 2009). This is unsurprising as employee discharges are the personnel action most likely to result in an EEOC complaint (U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 2020), and employers lose approximately one third of discrimination lawsuits in U.S. federal courts (Terpstra & Honorée, 2016). To a lesser extent, the termination literature has also suggested ways of minimizing other adverse consequences, such as aggression by departing employees (Karl & Hancock, 1999) and disruptions to workgroups (Kruse & Millette, 2017). Appendix A provides a list of termination best practices.
The exercise presented in this article focuses on the termination meeting (i.e., “Communicating the Message” in Appendix A). Most experts advise that the termination meeting be brief (approximately 15 minutes), unambiguous, and direct (Kasson, 2016; Walsh, 2012). Although providing an employee with the reason for the dismissal is often not a legal requirement, most employees will expect one (Walsh, 2012). Therefore, the manager should be prepared to tell the employee the reason for the dismissal concisely, without going into detail or rehashing past problems (Kruse & Millette, 2017; Walsh, 2012). Managers should also avoid using clichés or trying to spin the termination into something positive (Grote, 2016). However, if the employee attempts to question or challenge the reason for the dismissal, it is best to respond by refusing any further discussion but offering to have a conversation at a later time (Kruse & Millette, 2017). Managers should not try to prevent employees from crying or emoting, and they should respond to such displays with brief periods of silence (Grote, 2016). The termination meeting should conclude with a brief explanation of any severance package that the organization is willing to offer (e.g., benefit continuation, severance pay, outplacement services; Kruse & Millette, 2017; Walsh, 2012).
As many find it difficult to improvise a termination meeting, experts recommend that managers rehearse their message, and anticipate likely questions and responses, before discharging an employee (Connor, 2000). Several authors recommend using a checklist or script to maintain control of the termination conversation (Kruse & Millette, 2017). In fact, Karl and Hancock’s (1999) study found that 78% of human resource (HR) managers report receiving training in conducting employee dismissals, and training appeared to increase respondents’ confidence in their termination-related skills. However, there is reason to believe that training a scripted termination process is insufficient. In Karl and Hancock’s (1999) study, trained managers were more likely to report a hostile or violent termination encounter than those who were untrained, which the authors speculate might be explained by inadequate attention to interpersonal considerations when training managers.
The activity below provides students with the knowledge to create a termination script based on expert opinion. It also helps students acquire the confidence and interpersonal skills to conduct a termination meeting. As Chen et al. (2003) note, role-playing has been used effectively in the marketing, finance, and management disciplines to simulate real-world conditions, and role-playing techniques have been developed for teaching such complex activities as public-policy making, business ethics, leadership, and sales. If well designed, role-playing might enable a learner to progress through all four stages—concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, active experimentation—of Kolb’s (1984) experiential learning model (Newberry & Collins, 2012). Therefore, role-playing is the appropriate method for teaching students how to manage the interpersonal and communicative complexity of termination meetings.
Learning Objectives
After completing this exercise, students will be able to
Apply best practices, based on expert opinion, for terminating employees
Compose a termination script consistent with these best practices
Plan for the interpersonal challenges of conducting a termination meeting
Assess their own level of confidence in their ability to conduct terminations and manage the interpersonal challenges of termination meetings
The Exercise
This exercise is intended for a human resource management course and should be used after students have had some exposure to performance management and employee discipline concepts (e.g., performance improvement plans, progressive discipline). Although we have used this exercise in classes of 15 to 40 students, it can be used in larger classes as long as students are able to interact in pairs.
Timing of the Exercise
Typically, 90 to 130 minutes is required to complete the termination exercise. Table 1 provides an outline of the exercise and recommended time allotments for each step.
Outline and Suggested Timeline.
Step 1: Termination Review
Begin the session by reviewing the expert opinion on termination practices described above. Ask the class to consider how each recommendation helps achieve the four goals of an effective termination meeting: (1) minimizing the risk of a lawsuit, (2) minimizing the risk of violence and property damage, (3) being ethical and dignified, and (4) avoiding adverse effects on remaining staff and the work climate.
Step 2: Termination Script Creation
Have students individually compose what they would say, word-for-word, when dismissing an employee for performance-related reasons. To put the script in context, give students the scenario described in Appendix B.
Step 3: Termination Script Evaluation and Revision
Tell students to find a partner, exchange scripts, and evaluate their partner’s script using the evaluation questions in Appendix C. After all students have had an opportunity to share and evaluate each other’s scripts, have students compare their compositions to Appendix D and make revisions based on this information and their partner’s feedback. Reassure students that their scripts do not need to be identical to Appendix D to be effective.
Step 4: Student-Instructor Role-Play
After students feel confident with their scripts, ask for three volunteers to come to the front of the room to each role-play the termination meeting with the instructor acting as the employee. During these simulations, each student calls the instructor (i.e., the employee) into an imaginary office, asks the employee to sit down, and begins executing their script.
In order to expose students to possible employee reactions, behave in ways that will make the termination challenging for the student. For instance, the instructor can (1) respond argumentatively with one student, (2) beg and plead with another student, and (3) threaten to file a lawsuit or defame the company with a third student (see Appendix E for examples of dialogue that instructors can use).
Step 5: Discussion on Interpersonal Challenges
Facilitate a brief class discussion about how a manager can respond to difficult termination scenarios and employee responses. For example, managers can use periods of silence to allow employees to emote. Statements such as “I understand this is difficult” can express empathy in a sincere manner. Alternatively, statements such as “I’m not going to debate you” or “Perhaps we can discuss the details in more depth at a later time” can help conclude a meeting that has become unmanageable. Despite these possibilities, it may be important to remind students that many, if not most, termination meetings are not dramatic and do not involve aggression or hostile conduct.
Step 6: Role-Play by Student Pairs
Have students return to their pairs to practice terminating one another based on their scripts. Each student terminates their partner three times as their partner tries to make the termination difficult (similar to what the instructor demonstrated in Step 4). Specifically, the partner should respond argumentatively in one iteration, emotionally in another iteration, and threateningly in the remaining iteration.
Step 7: Termination Evaluation
After the role-plays have ended, ask students to reflect on their experiences. To accomplish this, have students evaluate the performance of their “managers” using the termination evaluation questions in Appendix F.
Step 8: Debriefing
After all student pairs have finished their reflections, facilitate a discussion with the entire class about the exercise. Begin by asking students to raise their hands if they feel that their partner did an effective job conducting the termination. In our experience, many hands go up.
Call on a few of these students to explain why they believe that their partner was effective, and how this relates to the list of best practices and the questions given in Appendix G. At times, a student will describe a statement or action that is inconsistent with expert opinion (e.g., promising to help an employee find another job, threatening the employee with being blacklisted if they do not accept the termination). Such instances are an opportunity to review best practices and reinforce the four goals of a successful termination described above.
Conclude the exercise by giving students a few moments of silence to reflect on the first five questions in Appendix G, and then ask for volunteers to share their answers with the class. Students are likely to reveal that they feel more knowledgeable, and somewhat more confident, about conducting termination meetings. However, they often remain anxious about performing this function in real life. Acknowledge students’ anxiety and explain that dismissing an employee will always be a difficult and emotionally charged task. The conflicting goals of managing legal risks while maintaining employee dignity makes the process inherently challenging, and a perfect termination may not be possible. Time permitting, consider asking additional questions (see Appendix G) about the role of progressive discipline, outplacement services, and severance payments. These questions can help relate the termination meeting to pre-termination and post-termination considerations.
Exercise Adaptations
Appendix H provides information on how the exercise and its assessment can be adapted for use in an online class environment and with other populations such as MBA students and working professionals.
Conclusion
Although educators have identified the need to teach students about how to have difficult conversations in the workplace (e.g., Crawford, 2008), there is little scholarship on teaching employee dismissals. This is surprising, as poorly conducted terminations create significant risks for employers, including potential lawsuits, violence, and adverse effects on employee morale. They can also entail emotional costs on supervisors and HR professionals. The exercise we have described fills this gap by guiding students through the process of creating a termination script consistent with expert opinion, role-playing a termination meeting, confronting challenges, and reflecting on their experiences. Not only will this activity increase students’ knowledge of termination best practices, but it also has the potential to increase students’ confidence and interpersonal skills.
Footnotes
Appendix A
Appendix B
Appendix C
Appendix D
Appendix E
Appendix F
Appendix G
Appendix H
Authors’ Note
An early version of this article was presented at the 2019 MOBTS conference in Mahwah, NJ.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
