I am posting here to get expert legal advice on wrongful termination in private tech firm based out of Gurgaon, the company is headquartered in USA and has 1000+ staff in India.
The employee was working as Sr Manager IT and has been with the company for about 16 months.
Here is what transpired on 27th Nov at 9:30 pm IST, the employee has monthly recurrent 1:1 with SVP IT ( head of cloud division within IT ) - On joining the VC call at said time expecting to have regular 1:1 he found his functional manager and head of HR on the bridge and what followed was the manager talking employee into the decision made by company to let him go and work with HR on the terms and path forward.
The employee was in absolute state of shock as the termination was announced to him on call which was supposed to monthly 1:1 to discuss regular business. The manger ( head of loud division ) and HR head cited the films reason for termination and the reasons being :-
- people do not like you
- there have been complaints against you
In employee view these are totally baseless accusations with no concrete ground since the company can’t come up with specific reason or individual and back it up with data/records etc
What followed after this was nothing but noise arguments back and forth until the employee hing up the call demanding to speak with CEO, CIO and legal counsel . And soon after the employee hung up his access was terminated effectively logging him out of corporate internal network rendering him state he couldn’t access any internal resources such as email, telephone or instant messaging etc
Clearly the employee reacted emotionally never expecting to be terminated for no evident reason, the fact is that there was no discussion, no show-cause notice, no warning that substantiates the termination. Ideally if there is a complaint against the employee there are provisions to coach, develop the employee in specific areas of improvement but none of that took place before cited reasons could lead to termination.
During the call HR did mention of offering two months renumeration and garden leave and clean exit on HR records.
Now the concern and the questions employee has are mostly on :-
- Being a top performer, change agent , and continuously delivering good results managing 16 people in two different functions/teams - why was this done to him and on what grounds?
- Even if there was a complaint or someone does like the person - why wasn’t he informed of this and possibly iron out the differences and even there was a mistake of any sort, it could have been managed/contained.
- Even if the business decided to let go of the employee, why wasn’t it done in respectful manner by giving a warning or notice period of some months and NOT terminate him on 1:1 call
- The employee has right to be treated in fair manner even if it’s an adverse decision against him, this has caused damage to his reputation beside loss of employment
What I am trying to understand is mainly aspects as they appears to be plausible options :-
1. Pursue litigation against the company ( the affected employee was part of leadership and knows all the dirty works of the company particularly how business is conducted in India, can also reach out to shots CEO, senior management, the chairman and board of directors in parent VC company, regulatory authority in USA etc ) but as anyone can tell this would be going against the establishment not knowing what could be the result .. can there be a case of defamation and seek compensation for damage to reputation, unfair treatment, loss of employment etc and what’s the maximum no of months …
2. Reach out to senior management and head of HR and meet a happy middle ground which is 3-4 months of compensation or call it severance, clean exit ( relieving and experience letter ) and maintain clean record for background verification when affected employee finds a new job.
3. What are the other options ?
Please feel free to comment or ask questions - if you are willing to offer expert professional services I am open to that, I request you to share the contact details so we can discuss further.
