Bank fired financial planner after no clear effort to improve and poor results over a year
The poor job performance of a short-term employee was just cause for a Toronto bank to fire him, the Canada Arbitration Board has ruled.
Keith D’Sylva was hired as a financial planner by the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) in Toronto in June 2006. His job entailed keeping a book of business, or group of customers, who have investments with the bank. As part of his duties, he was expected to contact each customer at least once a year and try to increase their business with the bank. RBC expected its financial planners to increase the value of their books by about 10 per cent each year.
When D’Sylva started his job, he inherited a book of business that was very successful, usually in the top 10 per cent in Canada as it consisted of mostly wealthy customers in Toronto. However, to maintain this success required regular contact and follow-up with the clients.
Over the course of D’Sylva’s first year with the book, he fell significantly short of his targets. RBC received complaints from some of the customers that D’Sylva was not following up on concerns they had given him but D’Sylva refused to accept any blame for this. RBC gradually learned from other employees and his overall performance that he was disorganized and didn’t consistently contact customers. He also left a $1 million mortgage for a colleague to complete while on vacation but failed to provide the proper documents, which forced the colleague to scramble to get it done in time.
RBC gave D’Sylva leads to potential new business and areas to solidify existing business but he didn’t look into them. He also stopped consulting a mentor who had been assigned to help him. In his first active quarter ending in early 2007, D’Sylva’s results were 60 per cent of target. In the next two quarters he reached only 46 per cent and nine per cent of target respectively and in his fourth active quarter, with zero sales, RBC told him he must show an improvement by August 2007.
On Aug. 14, 2007, RBC gave D’Sylva a final warning letter that outlined he must improve in five areas and contact all of his customers by Oct. 31.
By the end of October, D’Sylva’s sales were still weak. He still had failed to contact 65 out of his 291 customers. He had a performance evaluation that rated him at the lowest level in achievement of responsibilities. D’Sylva said he would improve in the coming year as he had been getting used to the book of customers and the transition had made it difficult to grow sales.
However, RBC felt it was unlikely he would improve at this point and terminated him on Nov. 22, 2007, for failing to meet the requirements of his position despite “ongoing corrective action.” D’Sylva said it was unfair to dismiss him because he took over at a time of low growth potential and needed more time to be properly evaluated. He also argued there were no issues of misconduct so termination was too harsh.
The board found D’Sylva knew from the moment of hiring that he was expected to increase the value of his book of business by 10 per cent, which was the same for all financial planners. His results did not just miss this target, but fell well below consistently. He was also given opportunities to improve, but didn’t take advantage of them.
Because of his failure to co-operate with RBC’s efforts to improve his results nor make more of an effort himself, the board found there was little prospect for improvement, despite D’Sylva’s claims. Since there had been no improvement in more than year, the bank made a fair assessment that he couldn’t do the job effectively and his dismissal was just.
