do I have to fire someone due to his lack of child care? — Ask a Manager

It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and all December I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.

There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back throughout the day.

Remember the letter-writer wondering if they’d need to fire someone due to his lack of child care? Here’s the update.

We did wind up letting the employee go, but it wasn’t because of the childcare issue.

As I mentioned in my email, I was waiting for guidance from HR but I knew what they would tell me: that being on call is a requirement of the job and if he could no longer meet that requirement, he could not remain in the position. We have a company policy that he was informed of before taking the job and it had to be maintained. HR is located in another state, so we had a Teams meeting with HR, his immediate supervisor, and me. He was not happy after the meeting, but he understood. After discussing with the rest of the team, we decided to move him to the end of the on-call rotation, giving him three weeks notice to figure something out for childcare for that week.

As a few readers suspected, he had a contentious relationship with his ex-wife and she was initially unwilling to budge AT ALL on their scheduled custody days. However, once she realized he could be fired over this, she agreed to accommodate and switch up custody arrangement for his on-call weeks. This seemed like the only solution all along, but it took the threat of job loss to get her to agree to it.

Just to clarify a few things I saw in the comments: he did not have this custody dispute when he took the job (it was a recent development), there aren’t enough calls or work at night to hire a night shift person, and he did not make enough money to hire a night babysitter or nanny for seven days straight. The on-call arrangement is normal for our industry and the rest of the team, while open to some accommodations for now, did not want to split up their on-call weeks over the long term.

There were some unrelated job performance issues that began long before the on-call issue and it was ultimately a repeat offense that led to us having no choice but to let him go. He wound up being let go just before his on-call week came up.