Comment by xnx
5 days ago
> In today's corporate world, it can be difficult or impossible to fire people
Really? In the US you can fire an employee for any reason at any time (aside from a few illegal reasons: union activity, racism, etc.).
5 days ago
> In today's corporate world, it can be difficult or impossible to fire people
Really? In the US you can fire an employee for any reason at any time (aside from a few illegal reasons: union activity, racism, etc.).
> In the US you can fire an employee for any reason at any time
On paper, yes. In practice, especially in a larger company? It's often a long journey that involves a lot of energy on the part of the manager. And then of course you may not get a backfill rec. So then one needs to ask themselves: is this person truly a net negative when compared to the energy that'd be required to jettison them *and* replace them with nothing?
Often the answer is no.
The trouble is this calculus is being done at the local level despite the mantle of responsibility of management; the manager decides it is not worth their personal effort to lose a low performer, because they will generate more work for themselves. Meanwhile, the company suffers the net negative impact of such a decision - arguably even worse for the manager's career.
That's the main challenge I have coaching management folks - now you have the option of doing work, and often you'll be tempted to take the path of least resistance, but that'll usually lead you astray.
Edited to add - sorry I missed your net negative comment - to touch on that, as it's another thing I see often.. Giving up on the org's ability to satisfy your needs is another toxic pattern for management - it is a lose/lose essentially. Management is often in a position of needing to push for the things it needs and advocate for the people relying on them.
I can't speak to a US perspective but in the UK and some EU countries I've experienced, firing someone is incredibly simple.
In fact every difficulty I've seen is simply that someone didn't follow the clearly defined procedure.
It's literally written out for you. You don't have to think or care how you feel, just follow the process and you're done. If the process says someone should stay then you got something wrong. Simple as that.
To be clear, it's simple for a *company* to fire someone. It often can be a pain in the ass for a *manager* to do it. For instance, a process like this:
1) Need to set up a clear paper trail over a period of time. For instance, a track record of being marked as an underperformed in their reviews with concrete complaints. In places that require this to be tied to the review, and f they only have annual reviews, this can take a LONG time.
2) Bring HR into the process, where they'll do the equivalent of "did you turn it off and on again?" for quite some time
3) If they let you, set up a PIP, which itself will take several weeks
4) Finally the person is let go
3 replies →
As a mediocre person, this gives me comfort.
the answer is always yes but the org pays the costs not the manager, and the manager isn't accountable to those costs, and the manager IS accountable and vulnerable to political costs
the "few illegal reasons" are able to be leveraged by almost any employee to write a letter and/or lawsuit suggesting they were fired for the wrong reasons. if you didn't internally document -- exhaustively -- how bad they were, and also assuming they didn't expertly document -- exhaustively -- how great they were and how unfairly treated they were as an employee -- it winds up being a gigantic pain in the ass and almost always better for the company to simply pay them $200k as a settlement to said lawsuit. And that comes out of the budget of a department who doesn't have $200k to spare.
That's why it's so hard.
> if you didn't internally document -- exhaustively
Even then who knows. I once had to deal with an employee who filed a claim without a leg to stand on. The powers that be had already decided from the get-go I was at fault, even though they clearly didn't even bother to look at what I submitted. When questioned about it they couldn't even speak to it! They initially sided with the worker, but after weeks of phone calls that basically amounted to "read what I gave you already", eventually they relented with "Oh yeah, you are right. I have revised my decision." If it had been a slightly more biased/lazy person instead...
> it winds up being a gigantic pain in the ass and almost always better for the company to simply pay them $200k as a settlement to said lawsuit. And that comes out of the budget of a department who doesn't have $200k to spare.
Lawsuits like this are more common than I expected before I got a peek behind the curtain, but in my experience companies aren’t rolling over for $200K settlements frequently.
The last time I was at a level in a billion dollar company to have some visibility into this, the company had a small team of corporate counsel who were pros at handling these cases. They would get a lot of suits from people hoping to get a quick payday and then spend a minimal amount of time actually engaging them. This either made them go away when the other side realized it wasn’t an easy win, or made them change their tune and ask for a very small settlement (four or five figures, not six).
And I’ve never heard of a company paying these settlements out of the budgets of small departments. That’s weird.
Nevertheless, even paying $200K to separate from a toxic employee would be a long term win relative to paying $200-300K (fully loaded cost with benefits) for multiple years while also risking them making your good team members leave and damaging your product.
I've participated in this too.
You're right that zero or four or five figures is the more common outcome -- usually because most people aren't quite so passionate to really lean into this type of thing.
On "never heard of a company paying these settlements out of the budgets of small departments" -- actually, that is the best practice. For the department the toxic employee was hired into to be 'accountable' for the fact that they hired such a person and did not exit them with adequate documentation to easily defeat a lawsuit.
Firing someone "for cause" is an incredibly long and difficult process at many organizations. They eventually get put on a PIP for 3 to 6 months, meanwhile they are looking for another job and continuing to drag down performance of the rest of the team. It would be cheaper to pay them to leave sooner.