Terminations & The Other Two Words

Warehouse and Operations as a Career

What do you think of the word Termination? Ever said I quit? And how’d that work out for ya? I’m Marty with you here at Warehouse and Operations as a Career. Everyone had a great week? Mines been busy, I’ve strayed a bit from my normal operations tasks and have been helping develop a couple of training classes, what else took up some time this week, oh, I’ve helped develop a couple employee engagement surveys, lets see, and I’ve been working with several supervisors on termination forms, more to, what is a termination and how should their companies forms be filled out correctly. Leads and Supervisors sometimes, it appears, associate termination as an employee being fired. Actually, I’ve found that very few associates are ever actually fired. So, I’ve been working on a few near future episodes, I’ve lined up some great guests and they’ll be sharing their expertise with us this month, I think you’ll enjoy them as much as I’m going to! Since I don’t have a particular topic for today lets just review my journal from this week, I think we can learn something from those few bullet points!

While I was putting together a few notes and developing some instruction for term forms I had the opportunity to think about the words I quit. Now a termination form is really just what it says it is. It’s generally not meant to mean I fired someone so here’s the paperwork. It is the form companies use to document and remove an individual from the payroll system, maybe any insurance policies, turn off any access badges to the building or time clocks, maybe they have a recurring charge for magazines the company pays for, gosh there’s a lot of things that have to happen when someone leaves their employer, even things like program passwords and email accounts have to be changed to protect the ex-employee from someone else using them improperly! Say an employee is moving, going back to school, maybe had a life changing event, who knows , lets say they’ve won the lottery, someone will have to turn in a termination form on them. All it means is that the employee and employer are parting ways, and it’s usually on good terms, but a termination form will be filled out and used to pass around to the various department heads to take them out of their systems. I’ve found most separations are voluntary, of course there are some that are checked involuntary, meaning the corrective action process has played out and the individual has been fired or released from their duties. I see that every once and a while with things like attendance issues or problems with productivity, things like that. And of course I hope if we’re supervisors or leads we’ve given the associate every opportunity to improve. I’m sure I’ve mentioned before how personally I take it when an employee has to be let go. Did I not train the properly, did I not explain the rules and expectations in a way they could understand them? And the big one, did I counsel them, spend time with them one on one, ask them how better I could aid them in correcting the problem. So that’s really all a termination form is, its nothing negative in any way, actually if we have system access, email, things like that they protect us by separating our names from them!

So back to I quit. This week I helped put together a couple of employee surveys. One of them was for an exit interview that companies can use for employees that quit, walk off the job or maybe they were hired but never showed up to work, or only worked for like a week and never came back in or called anyone! In our industry we see a lot of that I guess. I’m not sure why really, I think maybe since we can go out tomorrow and find a general labor, forklift or order selector position, and if we’re just thinking of our work as a job, instead of a career, we’re a bit prone to get upset or frustrated and utter those words, I quit, either to our bosses or ourselves and poof, we’re gone. Definitely not the right way to handle the situation but in our field, it happens, and pretty regularly.

I quit. Makes us feel a little better, I think we only push ourselves to say it when we’ve allowed ourselves to get frustrated, or maybe we’ve accepted a position that’s a little harder than we thought or out of our skill set and we don’t want to learn it. I think sometimes we let a recruiter or hiring agent talk us into something we don’t really have experience in, probably because we like that hourly wage that comes along with it! Or, and I see this pretty often, we’ll exaggerate our skills a bit, thinking we can learn it on our own? Ever done that?

Now we’ve said I quit. We have no job, we’re back to searching the job boards, putting in applications on-line or driving around knocking on doors and filling out applications, interviewing with hiring agents, is there anyone that likes interviewing, anyone not get all anxious during an interview for a job?

Could we have maybe went to our manager and told them, look this job just isn’t what I thought it was, I’m sorry if I’ve wasted your time but I don’t think I’ll be coming back tomorrow. He or she can make plans with that kind of information, maybe they’ll even have another position they can offer us. And as for that walking away at lunch, come on now, couldn’t we have again gone to our supervisor, told them something like “hey, I don’t like this or I just cant do the job, I’ll try and finish up for you today but this just isn’t going to work out.” We’re being much fairer to our boss and team. We were looking for a job, they gave us one, and all though its not going to work, I feel we need to hold up to our end of the bargain. Being fair and honest will pay off, I promise you. Last month I ran across an old boss that I hadn’t seen in over 10 years. She’s with another company now, we’re both still in the same industry, and she was able to help me out with an introduction to someone else. Its very beneficial to never burn any bridges. If your ever asked to do an exit interview with your old HR department or if we’re sent an exit survey, we should answer it or reply. Now I think its important again to be honest. If we quit for a reason to do with the company we should say it! But if we quit for some reason to do with us personally, we should be honest and say that too. Companies only ask for those interviews to help determine what’s wrong and if there’s something they can do better on their end. Even it turns out that their hiring agent needs to better explain the position or the expectations to their candidates! Ghosting or walking away isn’t going to help us or the company to make any changes.

So for those that’s said I quit before and just left, other than that good feeling for a minute, what’d we get out of it? I’d love for you to shoot us an email to [e-mail] and share your thoughts with us. Was it a good thing, or a bad thing, or how’d it really work out for you?

Quitting is inevitable sometimes. I’m not saying I think we have to always give a formal 2 weeks notice, I’d hope we would, but at the very least I think we need to go communicate with our supervisor, see how I slid that word communicate in there again? Maybe we didn’t do our due diligence researching the company or the position. We may have exaggerated our skill set a little or it could be that the companies just not a place we want to work for a long period of time. In my experience, if we’ll go talk to someone, communicate our unhappiness or concerns, maybe something can be changed. At least we’ve done our part right?

Work is something we’re going to have to do the rest of our lives, jumping from one job to another takes its toll on us, and we’re not really furthering our experiences. We’re in it for the long-haul ladies and gentlemen, we need to enjoy what we’re doing, be the best at it and make that money!

Join us on our Facebook or Twitter feeds using that @whseandops if you’d like to talk more about quitting our jobs. Its so easy to do but man, a lot of times we’re going to invest more time and money into finding another one and it’ll be just as bad for us, it’s just so much easier to plan out what we want and then go get that one.

I hope I brought up something or a point you can relate too today and that you’ll be joining us next week! I’m planning on having a guest on that we all can learn a lot from! Until then, please be safe in the workplace, we all have someone that’ll be affected if we let anything happen to us or our peers.