This is not only important in the daily workplace, but also if you should separate a disgruntled employee. If you must fire someone for an unlawful reason or a stupid one, then follow the process for high-risk separations. If Rick is working the system, he'll hire an unethical lawyer and say there was another "real" reason you fired him. By answering these questions, you must arrive at one of these conclusions. Besides, you'll decrease the chance of a potential litigation from the workforce. Besides the emotional stress of sacking workers, you must be wary of lawsuits. Decide who will run the firing meetings and who will be witnesses. They now think they can get away with this bad behavior all the time. Again use escalating discipline to create satisfactory evidence and prove you gave the sick and disabled worker chances to improve performance. Don't go back and document incidents and lackluster productivity from months and years ago.

They must know how to fire an at will employee while limiting their liability if the case goes to court. Employee theft punishment is a difficult area to tackle. The bottom line is you cannot use at will employment as justification to dismiss based on reasoning that is improper. (Certainly, we didn't use those words in the write-up, but this is what any normal supervisor would naturally think.) For whatever reason, a problem individual is not producing the quantity or quality of work they should to remain a part of the organization.