There’s an interesting debate going on in the Workforce Management Community Center about the propriety of firing a person by phone. One person notes that discharge by phone is preferable to discharge by e-mail, as RadioShack did to 400 workers last year.

As I wrote then, there’s only one right way to fire a person—in person, face to face, supervisor to worker. There’s a reason for this, and it is simple: It should be handled that way because management should be forced to personally confront the consequences of its actions.

I don’t know any good manager who likes firing people, but unfortunately, it’s part of the job. Hopefully, it doesn’t happen often, but when it does, you owe it to the person you are firing to sit them down and tell them the reasons why.

Can you do it by phone? Well, yes, but that should only be used in an extremely unusual or exceptional circumstance. I’ve had to travel across the country on occasion to discharge a remotely based worker in person, and although I hated having to do it, I always felt it was a trip worth making. Why? Well, when you have to fire someone in person, you find that you are a lot less willing to consider doing it in the abstract. And that’s why doing it by e-mail or phone is a cop-out. It dehumanizes a process that is pretty inhuman to begin with.

Taking a person’s job away, for whatever reason, is one of the worst things you can do to another human. Doing it in person doesn’t make it better, but it does make it more personal and is one small thing that can help the departing person walk away with some small measure of dignity.