If you have an employee who has stopped performing up to the standards you’ve set, you need to act fast. Constant errors can affect your team’s credibility and chip into your profits. On the other hand, terminating an employee too quickly can be a risky move for your business. Termination without taking the proper precautions may leave your team understaffed or cause a legal hassle. Before terminating an employee for poor performance, you need to follow a practical and fair process to reduce your liability, and give the employee ample opportunity to improve.

After all, recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and training a new employee is costly, and could be avoided if you can instead help your current employee improve. It’s best practice to follow a progressive discipline process – which generally includes a series of increasingly severe penalties for repeated offenses – if you want to conduct performance-based terminations the professional way. Unfortunately, in some cases, termination is the necessary end result.