Employer-Employee Relationship and Employee Dismissal Due to Bad Performance

Employer-employee Relationship-Employee Dismissal
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“It is quite easy for an employer to fairly dismiss an employee who is poorly performing in his role.”
Every employee in any given organization has a signed contract with their employers to perform their assigned tasks satisfactorily. Poor performance refers to failure for employees to meet the agreed work standards in their workplace. Moreover, it can refer to the gap between an employee's unsatisfactory performances. According to the Employment Rights Act 1996, employees have a right to prohibit an employer from dismissing them. Some of the fair reasons an employer can dismiss an employee include poor performance, misconduct, and redundancy. The above reasons mean that the management does not face restrictions on their rights to dismiss. However, it is worth noting there exist many hurdles that an employer must overcome to prove that the employee dismissed was poorly performing at their job. This proof is significant in qualifying dismissal for poor performance as a fair dismissal. Therefore, it is not relatively easy to dismiss an employee somewhat based on poor performance.
Poor performance is an employee's incompetence. For the employer to prove that the dismissal of an employee on the grounds of their incompetence is fair, the employer must show more than just their dissatisfaction with the employee's work. Moreover, reliance on poor performance as a cause for termination of an employee must be in tandem with Section 45(2) (5) of the Employment Act, which stipulates that there must be an acceptable reason. Although the burden of proof that the employee's poor performance was adequate rests on the employer, an employer has the duty of proving beyond reasonable doubt that the reason was fair. In Borden vs. Purolator Courier Ltd (1996), the employer failed to verify that the employee was incompetent. The court argued that the employer ha...