As others have said, it takes a lot of effort to fire somebody. And it takes additional effort to find, hire, and train a replacement.
But even if firing somebody was relatively effortless, I’d only do it as a last resort. I’d rather fix the employee than fire the employee. In many cases, that also took a lot of effort. In some cases, I’d put more effort into trying to straighten somebody out than I would have had to spend in just firing them. But I’d still rather do that because I feel it’s a better solution.
I had one boss would not fire anyone. Unless not firing that man might have gotten the boss fired. The only reason I could think of was he just could not let a man go and toss him out on the street. We had one engineer on final warning take off work early one day. did not even take his pager with him. Well an emergency came up. A distribution breaker tripped in the Santa Rosa store. After about 45 minutes of paging him will 911 pages they gave up. the Assistant Chief from the San Francisco store had to drive to Santa Rosa at 4:00PM. the end results the engineer was put on a 4 day leave without pay.
I work for a not for profit. We live or die on the basis of whether we make budget or not. We have not been making budget for about five years in one division. That staff member is still here and has never been put on a PIP.
The other staff member, she took an event that was rocking and rolling and made it tank last year. Multiple, endemic failures across the board. Yet the boss never even considers firing her.
My long-time underperformer was actually worth employing. Her coworker’s knew she was making way less than everyone else, and she got along fine with everybody. Considering inflation, she was a real bargain.
I am a government employee and I have the same idea about the private sector. Despite conventional wisdom, it is possible to get fired from a gubmint job (I’ve seen it happen twice). But it’s not something that happens a lot.
I’ve only ever had authority to recommend a firing, but not to actually execute one. Of the dozen or so people I could make such a recommendation for, I only ever did once. To be honest, even the bottom performers usually contributed enough that I could live with their results.
The person I did recommend we let go, we didn’t. Steps were taken, she was put on a completely unachievable performance plan but I left the company before she was reevaluated. By that time, the powers that be decided it was easier to just transfer her.
The place I work at now did not fire an under performing worker because out close friendship ties, cost of unemployment insurance going up, and because the owner is just too nice. Finally the under performing employee quit when her hours were reduced dramatically.
I was going to say this also. What you said, but also the under-performing person is probably making mistakes others have to fix. And in the non-government world it doesn’t take that long to find someone. A good manager should be thinking about hiring all the time, in case someone decides to leave.
I did a PIP for someone who actually did improve. He was a nice and cooperative person, but just was having trouble keeping up. He was fine for a while then started to sink again and then decided to resign. I’m glad I didn’t fire him.
In tech at some point the layoffs will come, which is a way of easily getting rid of low performers without all the hassle.
I’m a boss of a small company. Right now, we’re down to just me and one employee; we peaked at four people once.
There are a few reasons in my experience:
it’s expensive to interview and train a new person. Much of this expense is hidden to the extent that it’s time that could have been productive but is spent on interviewing and training rather than “real work.” But it is substantial. If I said it cost $10,000 to bring a new professional employee on board, I’d be low-balling it. In that, an underproductive slacker has to be really bad for you to recoup the costs of replacing them. You might even have severance costs to pay.
it’s also expensive from a tax perspective. This varies greatly between states and companies, but the idea is that your SUTA rate goes up if you have layoffs. In WA state, the lowest rate is 0.1% and the highest is 6%, on a wage base of more than $40,000. That means a layoff could theoretically cost you $2400 per year per remaining employee, though obviously it’s not usually that bad.
why do you assume the replacement is any better? After all, you didn’t hire the slacker knowing he was a slacker. If you hire a new slacker, now you have a second firing and a second onboarding.
people go through phases. Sometimes your best employee goes through a rough patch and is temporarily your worst employee. You know they can do better because they have in the past and you do your best to hang on with them.
just general sympathy. You want to be friends with your employees and everyone has a house/family/etc to support. As a boss, you want to be the good guy, and some people will take advantage of that.
It doesn’t apply to me, but institutional policies like diversity requirements, tenure and union contracts can make it very hard to terminate someone.
Speaking from my perspective, just because YOU think someone should be fired doesn’t mean they actually should be. I have a floor supervisor that reports to me, she in turn supervises a work group of 8-10 people, but she doesn’t have the ability to hire or fire. She has a severe personality conflict with 2 of the employees and has told me from the start that “they have to go”, but I just don’t see it. I did put one of them (the worst) on a 30 day notice/performance improvement plan where here performance improved dramatically and has stayed good, so of course I did not follow through with the termination.
She (the supervisor) is constantly documenting “incidents” that occur with this employee, but honestly they amount to nothing… she just doesn’t like her and is looking for any way possible to get rid of her. She is increasingly agitated that I haven’t fired this employee yet, but I have a degree in HR management and believe me when I tell you that there just isn’t any cause. But I could see from the supervisor’s perspective that she thinks I was being “soft” or was “afraid” to take action, but that’s not the case.
One interesting thing that I learned where I work is that managers get measured on turnover. It’s a metric that they have to meet. So if they fire too many people or too many people quit on them then it can reflect poorly on their performance too. I’d never considered that before. It’d make me a little nervous about firing anybody if that was something I had to keep in mind.
My experience seeing these kind of cases it is usually HR not doing their job. When employee A should be fired and HR does not follow up they are setting up a past practice of accepting bad work performance. Employee B does the same thing supervisor B pushes HR to do their job and rides HR, HR terminated employee B. Employee B now has a case of unjust firing because it was accepted with employee A. this is an over simplication of the problem.
Two examples of HR failure. We had a probationary employee that was failing on being able to complete properly any assigned job. Chief notified HR that he was terminating him on Friday and wanted to be sure his final check would be there. Hr told chief he could not fire the man with out setting up a performance plan. The man was probationary all the boss had to do was sway don’t come in next week here’s your check. By union contract. But HR would not let us. After he passed his 90 days HR called and said it was OK we cold let him go.
My son was a manager of a retail store. Had an employee who was not doing the job. The employee had two right ups for no show no notice. On his 3rd no show call the union business agent and asked if the union would have a problem terminating a employee under these conditions. The union said no they would not have a problem. My son then called HR explained the situation and asked that his final check be ready the next day. HR did not want to terminate the employee told my son he needed to give him another chance. They were afraid the union would object. As my son talked to HR he realized that HR had no idea what was in the union contract. He told the HR head that he had talked to the union and they had no objections to the termination. Then he told them he need them to do their job because he was notifying the employee the next day that he was being terminated for cause, and he would need that check to be at his store the next afternoon.
Mostly because HR won’t let me. I suggested at various occasions that we just pay them 2 months for an indemnity agreement, or they can go through progressive discipline over the next 6 months during which time they will probably end up being fired for cause and lose unemployment. HR didn’t go for that - something like, we shouldn’t be taking advantage of our employees. I said, after they take the package, they won’t be our employee anymore!
That wasn’t successful. Ended up taking 6 more months, and I did terminate that person for cause. What a giant waste of time that was.
Yes, at my company, managers are measured on “retention”, with ludicrously high goals to meet. Especially in a tech market where employees are constantly recruited and good people are hard to find.
There’s also politics. Some managers or executives don’t or won’t fire to keep up appearances, or to screw over somebody else.
My company tends to rely on re-organizations and layoffs, but even that is less common now.
There’s also the fear that you will lose the headcount before you get a replacement in. We often have very short windows to fill positions before the headcount is yanked. If you don’t already have a replacement lined up before your employee leaves, you are very likely to have no one at all.
Finally, there seems to be a group of people who are bad at their position but very good at managing up. They ass-kiss. They take credit for other people’s work. They swarm around the executives in a way that some people just eat up with a spoon. Their co-workers and subordinates all know they are a waste of space, but management doesn’t see it because “he is such a great guy.” I have repeatedly been in meetings with our division head where he states that he really likes so-and-so. So-and-so is great at the meet 'n greet, but terrible at actually doing anything else.
Also to protect employees from the whims of capricious and petty middle managers?
“Performance” can be somewhat of a grey area, particularly in white collar corporate work and particularly when you manage people. Do you really want your manager to be able to arbitrarily terminate you that easily?
Well this is actually something to keep in mind in general. What you think of as “performance” may be very different from the actual metrics used by the company. In this particular case, the company evaluates managers based on turnover with the theory that a good manager keeps employees happy and challenged and happy and challenged employees stay with the company longer. In reality, it just encourages managers to hold onto dipshits.