Termination and Subcontractors

Hey there, Childcare Boss! This is your coach, Andrea Dickerson. Today, I want to talk to you about the purpose of having policies in your company handbook. These policies that I want to discuss today have everything to do with your termination policy and your independent contractor’s policy. Now, granted, many of you may feel as if you have complete and thorough handbooks, but please pull out your handbook now and let’s go through today’s blog to be sure that your handbooks are clearly defining your policies around termination and independent contractors.

These are the two areas of my business that I caused myself the most heartache and grief.

Number one is before I knew better, I terminated individuals with the blanket clause in my mind that, based on Georgia law, anyone could be terminated within the first 90 days without reasonable cause. With that blanket clause in my mind and no further understanding, information, or scenarios, I found myself terminating individuals without having the right terminating policy.

The next portion that I found to give me the most heartache in my business was independent contractors. I wanted to avoid budgeting with the proper budget, and therefore, I had several employees as independent contractors who weren’t clear about what independent contractors do, don’t do, can do, and shouldn’t do. They weren’t clear about the back office of what it takes for them to work for my childcare program as an independent contractor. Due to me not referencing the proper budget setup, I had my independent contract policy set up all wrong. Truth be told, now that I think about it while creating this blog, I didn’t even have an independent contractor policy, but I had my first encounter with the Georgia Department of Labor where I found out that if a person is an independent contractor, then they must have their own setup as a business.

Avoid Making The Same Mistakes I Did

All of these particular policies that I want to talk about today are real-life examples that happened to me and I want to help you avoid making these same mistakes in your childcare business. In order for me to improve and shift my policies to the next level, I realized that I needed to learn more about my state’s policies when it comes to employees. The first thing I did was to go to my local Department of Labor and request an employer’s handbook.

Now, of course, you may think you are an employer; you don’t need a handbook. This little handbook kept me out of loads of trouble when it came to being a novice in the hiring industry. Remember my story? If you haven’t read my book, Diaries of a Child Care Boss, you should grab it by clicking here today.

In my story, you know that all I had was a passion and a love for caring for children. There was no additional experience underneath my belt. I’ve never had any experience managing people before. If you can relate and you find this story to be relatable, then I’m sure if you take a look in your policies, you may find that you are dealing with the same issue, not having policies for how you terminate individuals, or what will cause a person to be immediately terminated from your organization, or hiring on individuals without them being in the proper tax category, which is called independent contractors.

When I went to my Department of Labor and began to read the employer’s handbook, I began to understand the legal ways of how to position my policies and procedures within my company employee handbook. So, make sure you take a look at your local Department of Labor, which is the organization that provides Unemployment claim assistance and payout for employees. Never ever go into the Department of Labor thinking they are for you; they are working for employees. Then I realized that I needed to understand exactly what policies meant and the purpose of policies in my workplace and what should my policies include.

Outline Your Organization’s Practices

I believe that your employee handbook policy is a statement that outlines your organization’s practices and procedures pertaining to that particular subject. It can cover your day to day operational matters to be compliant with employment legislation. Did you hear that? Did you hear exactly what your employee handbook is for? Your employee handbook is to cover your day to day operations and to make sure that your matters in your business are compliant with your employment legislation. When I did the research and found exactly what those policies meant, I knew I needed to go to my local Department of Labor to find out what were the employment legislations.

Ask Yourself This…

Now, take a look at your handbook and ask yourself, have I written out a list that could be non-inclusive of what could cause a person to be immediately terminated from my organization? Have I also written out a list that helped employees or independent contractors understand their job description and title and their tax bracket in my organization? Now, take a look at your company handbook and be honest with yourself.

When an independent contractor comes to work for you, do you give them the right tax documents? Or if there’s an independent contractor that you are relieving them from their duties, is there a way that you will do that because terminating an independent contractor and terminating a person are two completely different things? In my experience, when working with independent contractors, terminating them means terminating the contract and not a person. In my experience of working with team members and doing terminations for team members, I was terminating the person. Now that I had clarity, you need to get clarity too.

I provide coaching and mentoring like this to my clients that are a part of my JumpStart Blueprint 2.0 or my JumpStart Academy Course. Either way, you will find that knowing more about how to manage your employee handbooks, your employees, and your hiring decisions from an experiential point of view will be worth the investment. All right, to find out how to become a part of JumpStart 2.0 or JumpStart Academy, click here. I’ll have a 15-minute conversation with you and we’ll go from there.