SSS · Termination & Reinstatement Management

Can poor performance alone be grounds for termination?

Rarely. Poor performance, asserted in the abstract and without documents, is not a valid ground on its own. For employees within the scope of job security the Labour Law (No. 4857) requires…

Updated · July 20261 min readCategory · Termination & Reinstatement Management
Short answer

Rarely: the communication of targets, the evaluation, the employee's defence, and the opportunity to improve must be documented. A performance termination without process is the classic reinstatement scenario.

Rarely. Poor performance, asserted in the abstract and without documents, is not a valid ground on its own. For employees within the scope of job security the Labour Law (No. 4857) requires a dismissal to rest on a valid reason, and for a performance dismissal it expects a particular procedure: the targets and the expected level of performance notified to the employee in advance, an assessment made against objective criteria, the employee’s written defence taken, and a documented opportunity to improve — training, a change of duties, or simply a reasonable period.

One of those steps is not negotiable: before a conduct- or performance-based dismissal you must take the employee’s written defence (Article 19). Skip it and the termination fails on procedure alone, however strong the underlying reason was, and that single missing document is what loses these cases most often. It matters too that the criteria were realistic and attainable, and applied consistently to everyone rather than to one person. In short, what decides the case is not the performance itself but whether the process was objective, graduated and documented.

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Termination & Reinstatement Management

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