Approximately 90% of people in western cultures get married by the time they turn 50. In the U.S., nearly half of the couples end up getting a divorce. Yikes!
If your company has a hundred employees, there’s a very good chance that you will deal with multiple employees that will go through a divorce. As work is a part of everyday life, rarely will an employee able to completely hide the divorce’s effects. As HR, how should you deal with an employee going through this emotional time?
When employment issues arise because of stress at home, HR professionals are put to the test. After all, you are in human resources working for a business with a bottom-line. As an employment lawyer and a family lawyer, we want to help. We see these issues play out in court rooms. It’s not pretty. In this article, we’ll suggest how you should handle this problem from a human perspective, because acting like a compassionate person is the first and best line of defense to lawsuits.
There are plenty of different reactions you’re going to see when this happens. The divorcing employee may breakdown and cry in their office, act ashamed or embarrassed, avoid co-workers, and perform poorly for periods of time. Even more challenging for HR, is that co-workers around the divorcing employee may avoid the employee, try to offer unsolicited advice, gossip, or try to take advantage of the person by blaming them for team failures. All of these things do affect the company’s profits, atmosphere, and/or culture.
Let’s get this out of the way. Your job is to manage the recruiting, screening, interviewing, and placing of the workers for the company. It is also your job to protect the company. Your job description doesn’t tell you to hold the hands of crying employees. But, remember why you got into HR in the first place! You like humans. You probably want to help other people. Listening and comforting may come easy to you, the difficult part may be knowing where to draw the line for a struggling employee.
As humans, our core foundations include our jobs, health, family and relationships. When one of these is out of place, we lose the feeling of security. When you are comforting the employee who is going through a divorce or is freshly divorced, here are some things to keep in mind:
But don’t forget your responsibilities. You must keep the business side of things in mind:
If you have to give the employee a written warning, understand that you still should be compassionate towards them. This issue here is serious and must be dealt with correctly or you may be looking at a lawsuit for discrimination later on – we’ll get to this in the next section.
Finally, some employers have an Employee Assistance Program for situations like this. EAP’s often provide counseling for employees who are undergoing traumatic personal events. Many educational institutions and public entities have established EAP’s already in place.
Did you know that marital status is, in certain states, a protected characteristic in employment law? It isn’t under Title VII, but some states (like California) do protect it. It’s often overlooked, but marital status discrimination is when an employer treats the employee differently because of the worker’s marital status (single, married, divorced, etc.).
In such states, if a divorced employee can provide evidence that he/she was discriminated against because of his/her divorced status, the company can get in trouble. Your job is to do things right and to handle things gracefully so that nothing is seen as discriminatory.
Remember that bullet point above about making sure that a divorcing employee doesn’t continue poor performance for too long? If you have to terminate or discipline an employee because of poor performance, make sure that you have proof of poor performance as being the reason for it. Keep records of when you reminded the employee to perform better or when you gave them warnings. Take note of specific things that reflected the poor performance. Write everything down just in case the day of a lawsuit for this termination comes around. Without evidence, this employee may claim that he/she was discriminated against because of their marital status.
We all experience ups and downs. Your goal in these circumstances should be to strike a good balance for the company. You don’t want to lose a perfectly good employee because of a period that will be over soon enough, but you also don’t want the company to suffer because the employee can’t handle their situation professionally. Our suggestion is to be compassionate and consistent and you’ll likely reap benefits of a loyal employee for years.
