When to fire?

[mikko123]

We have a small online retail company with 8 full and part time staff aside from myself and partner. One is a website manager and most others are shipping and operational people. We have processes in place to reduce mistakes, but shipping is still a manual process and occasionally a mistake is made with the wrong item or a missing item in a box. I know everyone makes mistakes, but I'm curious to get other entrepreneur's feedback on when is too many. Some companies would document every mistake and terminate an employee after making just a few (even if the percentage is very low) while others might let it just go on and accept it as a manual process that is going to have some mistakes from time to time. What do you think?

Also our site manager is terrible at following up on anything. We constantly have to remind him of something we asked him to do. We encouraged him to make tasks lists, which he doesn't and even made some for him, which he usually ignores. He also takes virtually no initiative, constantly asking us for low level feedback or not looking deeper to answer a question himself. I know it sounds bad, but at the same time in small companies replacing people is far easier said than done. He's been here for over a year, going through hiring and training is tedious, and who knows if the next person will be better. What are your thoughts on this?

[michael_terry]

I think the Site Manager would be more of a concern for your business as it can directly affect the entire work environment. No business wants to have someone unwilling to do the best they can in any position.

Regarding the manual process of shipping items, if all other steps in the process are error-free then you have reason to discipline. You need to really make sure it wasn't the stock-boy/girl, or the shipping to your store, or mistype of an order or any of the other 100 reasons prior to discipline.