Persistent Disregard of Work Instructions May Justify Termination by the Employer

Employees are required to follow work constructions of the employer. A persistent disregard of instructions may justify termination, even if no damages result in a particular case. The case discussed below, for example, involved instructions on how to keep minutes of a team meeting or not to Work on Sundays.

In a recent case, in which we represented a client before the Labor Court of Frankfurt am Main (judgment of February 1, 2024 – 26 Ca 2177/23), the validity of a termination based on the employee's personal conduct was at issue. Our client had terminated the employee because the plaintiff had repeatedly disregarded work instructions.

Specifically, the employer in that case had instructed the plaintiff to prepare minutes reflecting the results of a team meeting. Yet, the plaintiff prepared verbatim minutes, because she thought that this made more sense. In addition, the plaintiff had been asked to no longer send blind copies of emails (bcc's). The plaintiff disregarded these instructions, in particular by sending bcc's to her immediate superior on several occasions. Moreover, the plaintiff had been told to stop work on a project that had been assigned to her earlier. Nonetheless, the plaintiff continued to work on this project, even asking her coworkers to assign high priority to the project and to continue working on it. The plaintiff also repeatedly ignored instructions not to work on Sundays. After multiple warnings, our client ultimately terminated the plaintiff's employment for convenience.

The Labor Court of Frankfurt am Main correctly decided that a persistent breach of obligations arising from the employment agreement may justify termination for good cause without notice as well as termination for convenience . According to the court, this was true not only for a breach of principal contractual obligations, but also for a breach of ancillary obligations. The court found that an employee has persistently failed to comply with contractual obligations if the employee intentionally and continuously, and without justification, fails to comply with these contractual obligations. As the court explained, this can be the case even in the event of a single refusal to carry out work instructions, for example if the employee has ignored a previous warning.

In the aforementioned case, the plaintiff intentionally failed to carry out clear work instructions of the employer on five separate occasions within a time span of just over one month. In the view of the Labor Court of Frankfurt am Main, this conduct rose to the level of persistent disregard of work instructions, so that the employer's notice of termination for convenience was legally justified and thus valid. The judgment has since become final and conclusive.