Process Servers Serving Severance

Human resources adviser Bob Benwick recalls watching in amazement as a supervisor of a Vancouver hospital's cleaning staff ran screaming from the room after being told by a manager that her job was being outsourced.

Instead of taking the severance notice the manager tried to hand to her, the woman ran down the hall yelling: "If I don't see it, you can't fire me."

A few days later, unbeknownst to Mr. Benwick, the hospital manager decided to have a process server deliver the notice. When he caught up to the woman's car at a stoplight and handed her the paper, she drove over his foot.

"That was a really wild, but totally inappropriate, way to tell someone they no longer had a job," recalls Mr. Benwick, chairman of Vancouver executive coaching company R.W. Benwick Associates Ltd.

It's the sort of disaster that can happen if managers aren't sensitive to the emotional impact of delivering the "you're fired" news, Mr. Benwick says.