Understanding Fair Dismissals: Performance, Conduct, and Redundancy Explained (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: chap left a comment there on one of my youtube videos the other day and he accused me of being all for the employee and he was obviously an employer because he said what do you do with poor employees what he actually said is what do you do with horseshit employees but for the sake of this video we'll describe them as poor employees poor employees can be managed by employers. However, there is limited grounds under the Unfair Dismissals Act for terminating and all dismissals, once you're 12 months continuous service, are presumed to be unfair dismissals unless, and this is the key point, you can get the dismissal, the issue, into one of a number of categories. The first one One is the capability, competence or qualifications of the employee for performing work of the kind which he was employed by the employer to do. This is essentially the performance ground. You can terminate an employee on the grounds of performance, however, it can be a slow enough process. You do have to give the employee the opportunity to improve and you do have to give him or or whatever training might be required, within reason obviously, and you need to give them as I say the time to improve and they need to be clear on the standards that they're not meeting and given the assistance to meet the standards. So that's the performance related termination and normally that should be preceded by putting the employee on a performance improvement plan. The second category of dismissal that would be considered to be a fair dismissal would be on the grounds of conduct, the conduct of the employee. If the conduct of the employee is such that the employer can justify a dismissal, for example gross misconduct, in those circumstances there is no difficulty with the employer terminating the employment. A third category of fair dismissals, fair terminations of an employee would be on the grounds of redundancy. The fact of redundancy, redundancy circumstances would be a defence to any claim for unfair dismissal provided it's a genuine redundancy and provided the employee has been fairly selected and provided, quite frankly, that the procedure has been reasonable and fair. And then there's a fourth category in the Unfair Dismissals Act and that is any other substantial ground. It's not quite clear what any other substantial ground means, but if you're in that category you could be in some difficulty in justifying the dismissal. There's another category then where the employee or where the employment comes to an end by reason of some statute or some failure on the employee's behalf to be able to perform the contract for some lawful reason or some operation of law. For example, if an employee was jailed, then clearly the contract is going to come to an end because the employee simply cannot perform it. If the employee was a sales rep, and it was a condition of the contract that he or she hold a driving licence, or indeed a lorry driver, then clearly if the employee lost the licence, the employment could come to an end. They are the broad circumstances, performance, conduct, redundancy, these would be the three big ones, where an employer can be justified in terminating the employment and be able to withstand the claim for unfair dismissal. Unfair dismissal, remember, only applies after an employee has 12 months of continuous employment. Therefore, from an employer's perspective, the employer should really make sure that in the first 12 months of employment and during the probation period, which would probably be six months, but could be extendable to eleven or eleven and a half months, during that period the employer should really make it his or her business to suss out the employee and ensure that the employee is right for the role in particular and for the company and so on. Because within that twelve months period, clearly the employee doesn't have the benefit of the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977 to fall back on and is in a vulnerable position. It is up to the employer, during the probation period and during the first 12 months, to ascertain whether the employee is right or not. If the employee is right for the business, fair enough, after 12 months then the protection of the statute, the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977 kicks in and the employee will have strong enough rights under the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977, but you do have those categories Conduct, performance, redundancy. They will all allow an employer to terminate an employee for one of those reasons. I hope you find this video useful. As I say, I advise employers and I advise employees and quite frankly, I'm a solicitor so I just give advice. I'm not really on one side or the other, it doesn't make any difference to me quite frankly. I don't want to seem off-handed or anything but obviously I do this for a living, I give advice for a living, so if an employer comes to me, or if an employee comes to me, then I give them advice. It's as simple as that. So I don't have any philosophical or theological favouritism towards employer or employee. I deal with everybody fairly as best I can, give them a good service as best I can. I give them the best advice that I can. Hope you find this video useful. If you do, I would appreciate if you gave it a thumbs up down below, and you may be interested in subscribing to my YouTube channel. Thanks a lot. you