To me there is a difference between underperforming (doesn’t reach the line but doesn’t obstruct work and the difference can be compensated) and, uh, antiperforming. Someone who screws up things for everybody else isn’t just underperforming, it needs a different word.
And my first thought is “are they hiring?” I like having job security.
Running diesel repair shops for over 35 years I was almost always the one in charge of hiring and firing. If I did fire someone it was after a long series of verbal and written warnings. In most cases they knew it was comming and they were either grossly unqualified to do their job or really didn’t care that much.
More often than not we had employees who could skate by for years right on the edge. Some of our best mechanics had horrible attitudes and were like a cancer in the shop as far as moral goes. I would have loved to have fired a few of these guys but it just doesn't work that way.
Not counting automatic firing offenses such as drug or alcohol abuse, theft or violence. I doubt I fired more than 6 people in 35 years.
I’d have thought “Master?”
I’ve seen it twice in my office, essentially for criminal behavior at work.
At the law firm where I used to work, the younger lawyers were regularly pushed out as they became more senior, but everyone knows going in that that’s the business model.
Unlike the military, Pensions are typically vested after a couple years. My brother spent 4 years in the US Air Force and told me that officers with reserve commissions were frequently reduced to their enlisted ranks when they had 19 years and 6 mnths service. This reduced their pensions enormously. Can’t do that in the civilian world.
Universities solve this in a different way. An assistant professor is hired on a 3 year term contract. Three years later the contract is either renewed or it isn’t. If it isn’t you are gone. You knew it was a 3 year contract. If it is renewed for another three years, then at the end of that time, you must either be promoted to associate professor with permanent tenure or let go. This will be decided by a well-documented procedure that involves outside referees to evaluate your research. Student evaluations will document your teaching. Or at least how hard you mark.
In some fields it can be a 7 year contract. It’s like the 7-year probationary period from Hell, which kind of seems to explain why so many tenured professors seem to be kind of zombified: they’re just exhausted!
Well, it depends. By that, I mean it depends on just how much authority a manager actually has to hire and fire anyone, because upper management and human resources may utterly castrate a line manager and leave him powerless to discipline or remove an employee. Anecdote below; the TL;DR version is that HR exists to protect the company and not to support the manager even when clear disciplinary action is necessary.
When I was a manager, I inherited a group of people who included a certain individual–let’s call him “Bob”–who was well known to do poor work when he did anything at all, and made people uncomfortable to boot by talking about his multitude of personal issues and outlandish political views (Obama birther, zero taxer, New World Order espouser, et cetera). The previous boss had kept him on under the argument that it would be too difficult to fire him on a performance basis because of his protected status and because “he wasn’t hurting anyone”, which was a patent lie because every single time someone was instructed to give him tasking they’d end up having to do it themselves. Having been on the receiving end of his ineptitude twice resulting in me working very late/overnight to meet deadlines to perform the straightforward tasks he’d been assigned to do and had neither done nor communicated his lack of progress, so I was well aware of the issue and had previously refused to use him on my tasks. Notwithstanding this, when I took over the group I was determined to make my expectations clear and give everyone, including Bob, the chance to demonstrate their aptitude and pursue roles and work that they were interested in. I had personal sit-downs with everyone and had a frank discussion about my expectations of them and their expectations of me, which for the most part was easy and valuable. With Bob, I explained to him my previous experience and that as his manager I expected to see good performance, and outlined what that looked like. He was superficially agreeable, but over the next couple of weeks started sabotaging other peoples’ work and getting into arguments to the point that I had to sit down with him several times and have a “attitudinal correction” discussion. He ended up going to my manager (without telling me) and complaining about how I was “bird-dogging” him. When called out to talk to my manager I explained what I had done and observed, including the written notes and e-mail that I had taken, and requested permission to talk to HR about starting the performance improvement process so that there would be an objective record of Bob’s performance and opportunity for improvement, to which my manager was initially agreeable.
It was here that I ran into a fucking stone wall.
The HR person I talked to initially was encouraging–she complained that not enough managers were willing to take disciplinary steps–but referred me to the HR person responsible for this process. This guy–call him Chuck–was a bag of human tapioca. I spent twenty minutes on the phone with him explaining the multitude of issues and the documentation I had, with him barely responding. At the end, he promised to send me some information on the PIP and that we would talk again. Next thing I knew, I had my boss in my office telling me that we weren’t going to be putting Bob on a PIP, and that I just needed to find a way to encourage him to improve. Incredibly, Chuck and my boss had a conversation in which, despite neither of them ever having any work interactions with Bob, decided that we didn’t need to deal with the problem. For the next eight months I spent at least a couple hundred hours correcting Bob’s behavior, finding people to do his job for him (or not infrequently doing it myself, often on unpaid time), and finding make-work tasks that didn’t matter whether he completed them or not. During the same time I was under increasing pressure to “do more with less” and encourage people to work unpaid overtime even as Bob went around blabbing conspiracy theories, bugging the living shit out of people trying to do real work, and disappearing for hours at a time during the day. I kept detail records of my meetings and observations with Bob and made biweekly and then weekly reports to my manager recommending over and over that we start a process because none of my efforts to correct Bob’s behavior were having any affect, and I was ignored or denied every time.
Finally, the issue came to a head when Bob committed an apparent security violation, and after being interviewed went to another employee who he believed had spoken out on him (he hadn’t) and told him that he’d “better watch your back”. I was on travel at the time because we were so strapped for people, and when I got a call from this employee (a really hardworking and honest worker who I’d known for over a decade) saying he was afraid to come into the office, I finally had it. I sent an e-mail to my boss, his director, Chuck the HR rep, and his boss using the kind of language that they couldn’t ignore, e.g. “hostile work environment”, “verbal intimidation”, “unstable emotional behavior”, et cetera. That finally started the shitstorm, although the attention was initially on me. We actually had to have a call discussing my fitness as a manager and questioning why I wasn’t in the office before HR would even come out and talk to the threatened employee and dealing with the issue, to which I responded with the sleet of e-mails between myself and my manager where I’d expressed my concerns and recommendation, and offered to provide them the four inch thick file of handwritten notes about my weekly meetings with Bob. Although I was Bob’s manager (both of record and in practice) I was told that my authority was only to sign his timecard, and was excluded from any of the discussion. When they finally came out and started talking to Bob, the employee he had threatened, and other people who had to work with him, the crazy become apparent, especially when they interviewed Bob about the original security violation. They offered him some kind of buyout to get him to leave without firing him, and I was reprimanded for “letting the situation get out of hand” and “managerial misconduct for not following company processes” (e.g. taking personal notes, having disciplinary discussions outside of the PIP) even though there was a clear record of my having repeatedly requested to start the formal process.
What did I learn from this? As much as HR doesn’t exist to protect the employee, it also doesn’t exist to support management. It exists purely to protect the company from liability, and as a manager the only way you can get HR to take effective action is to make the liability of not doing anything worse than disciplining or firing an employee, or go to a higher level and get someone to kick them in the ass. They have absolutely no concern or interest for productivity, morale, or supporting effective management, and will actively discourage you from being an effective manager if it means they have to take any action or assume any kind of liability. I’ve since left that company and have zero interest in ever being in a managerial position again.
Stranger
This is absolutely true (at least in technical fields) and companies are frequently not willing to spend the money to perform proper reviews and background checks even if a manager is willing to put in the effort to perform due diligence.
As a manager over the course of a year I made two hires; one was a rehire that I knew would be an outstanding performer; the other was a junior level position that required a particular set of skills and aptitudes. I was initially given a stack of resumes and told to pick one; I went through and found that only two or three even met the minimum requirements, and in talking to them on the phone along with the discipline lead determined that none would be suited to the position. When told that my choice was to hire from the pile or nothing I picked nothing because I knew it would take away from the work that my current engineers were doing just to train and directly supervise this person. My manager relented and allowed me to put out a wider search. When I finally selected a few candidates that were worth a more extensive interview, I was told that there was no budget to fly in candidates below the executive level and I’d have to do some kind videoconference/Skype interview (without any instructions or support about how I was going to set that up). I objected again and argued that I needed to have a candidate meet with several members of the team in person to evaluate the candidate’s aptitude and see if they would be able to work in the team. After standing my ground, I got an agreement to bring in one candidate. I did, and that candidate didn’t work out (actually insulted one of the interviewers and misrepresented his background); when I was castigated for my “failure” I argued out that this was the entire point of bringing in a candidate for in-depth interview and that it should be expected that some candidates wouldn’t fit or weren’t really qualified. I was also criticized for checking on references personally instead of leaving it to HR even though I never got anything back from HR indicating that they had performed any kind of reference or background check.
The candidate I finally settled on (after many phone interviews and a couple more in-depth interviews) turned out to be an exceptional performer. Meanwhile, the other group on that site hired a whole slew of people straight from resumes or phone calls and has had numerous problems with poor performance, people who didn’t have the skills they claimed, and in a couple of cases people who didn’t meet security clearance requirements, which was not discovered because HR didn’t perform any reference or background checks!
So, while it does require cost and effort to hire the right person, there is also substantial cost and effort in hiring and training the wrong person, and then having to deal with the fallout later. Unfortunately, HR doesn’t bear those costs, so they don’t give a flying fuck. The result is, as a manager, you are largely stuck with the people you have, and unless someone is supremely terrible or you have a candidate in hand that you are assured will be better, you’re often stuck with what you have.
The “partner or perish” model is unfortunately common in law firms. It makes sense from a certain standpoint because it vets out the multitude of people who go to law school to make money but don’t care about actually practicing law, but there are plenty of people who are perfectly competent at writing and litigation but have no real interest in being vested as a partner in a major firm. Big law firms are havens of dysfunctionality and expressed neurosis.
Dude, if you can spend a career in the military (in a MOS where you have to do actual work) and get above average performance ratings, the civilian job world is trivial by comparison. The kind of criticism you’ll receive from anyone will just roll off your back, and you are likely to be your own worst critic about the quality and speed of your work. The boiler rooms that hire and fire people on a whim are not places you’d want to work anyway, and the worst part about the civilian workplace is that you are going to have to lower your expectations of coworkers for discipline and completeness of their work.
Stranger
Lots of good points here.
The “bad” employees that I always wonder why they never get the can are the abject asshole types. Not only do they do little to no work or actually a drag on production but NOBODY likes them in the least. The type that if they died suddenly you’d feel bad…because you were glad they did.
I was curious to read this discussion, because my desk is beside a poorly performing co-worker. I know she makes more money than I do, and does far less and does it poorly. It really makes me not give a shit about my own job some days, when I know she’s a fuck-up who’s paid better than I.
This, or their “job” seems to consist mainly of finding ways to get other people in trouble.
I’m a little confused- if she was “doing the bare minimum required”, how is she an underperformer ? She’s certainly not a great performer, but I think when people talk about "underperformers " , they’re generally talking about those who *don’t * manage to do the bare minimum.
Why don’t I fire underperformers? In large part because it is a unionized, civil service environment and my predecessors didn’t do their jobs. It’s hard to fire a union employee who has never had an unsatisfactory evaluation, even if the reason is because no evaluations were done for 20 years. Partly because the rules prohibit it, but also because they were never actually that their work was unsatisfactory in a way that is meaningful to them. I remember one employee- she made a really big mistake, and claimed she wasn’t properly trained on a basic task of a job she had already held for 20 years. After our conversation regarding what she did, what she should have done, the result of her mistakes , I wrote a memo memorializing the conversation and copied her personnel folder and my supervisors (as policy requires) . She wrote a rebuttal that basically blamed everyone else she could find for her mistake, and also contained a statement to the effect of previous supervisors (plural) had written such memos in the past about her work , but they had never sent them to “the important people”. Another bunch were absolutely shocked that there was negative information in their evaluations when my employer started enforcing the requirement for yearly evaluations and I directed my staff to evaluate their subordinates accurately. They did not dispute the accuracy of the information, nor did they claim that their supervisors had never spoken to them about these issues before. They simply didn’t think all of those conversations mattered in the way the written evaluation did.
Holy shit. I don’t know how you stayed sane. I would have gone “Bob” myself in your shoes.
We jokingly call that “subtracting value.”
And getting rid of one of those people is “addition by subtraction”
I kind of didn’t. I grew increasingly angry, both at being so ineffectual in that role, and having to bear the brunt of anger and frustration of my customers from work that was delayed or done poorly because we were understaffed and I had to spend time working with this person (and a couple of other employees whose work wasn’t up to snuff). At one point I was on a staff meeting where four successive program manages complained that their programs weren’t getting adequate support from my group (and the other group, but I was bearing blame for that as well for some reason) and lost it and stopped the meeting to list out exactly all of the people I had in my group, who was assigned to what, and how numerically short I was of employees to cover the scheduled work (4-5 people) notwithstanding having to spend time disciplining Bob to no effect and deal with other nonproductive administrative bullshit. I then went on travel for a solid month and Bob had his terminal meltdown (for which I was also blamed); after that, I started looking for a new job.
The odd thing was, every time there was a big complaint I would offer up my resignation to my manager, and every single time he would insist that they didn’t want me to resign and was pleased with my performance. But when it came to backing me up or approving new requisitions to go out and hire people, he was a zero. Nice guy, no backbone.
Stranger
The power to fire is the power to fuck up somebody’s life. I don’t take it likely. Before I sign off on a dismissal because of incompetence I want to counsel her or him, to do what I can to avoid causing major problems.
I fired two people yesterday. I didn’t sleep well last night.
Or you can work in a company that has a quota to manage out the bottom 5% every year. Talk about creating a toxic environment where you just have to outrun your cow-orker. In such a situation, managers never ever fire someone but keep 'em in reserve for 5% culling of the herd.
Jack Welsh started this off at GE. I saw an interview with him after he retired where he said the 5% rule was something that he regretted. I haven’t been able to find a link to said interview, so if anyone has one please share.
Where are you that you have fear of legal trouble if you fire a person? In my state, SC, anyone can be fired anytime for any or no reason. It is a right to work state. There are many such states, designed to weaken unions. Or if these restrictions are company rules, that is one tough company.
I am not in a position to fire anyone but all of us who work under my manager have lost respect for her because she will not fire a worker. The worker can not do the job and makes all of the rest of us work harder to take up her slack. It is bad for moral as she is paid the same as we are and the manager will not listen to us. Soon I will be moving on. This company does not care about workers or the quality of the product and it shows. Bad management is common and that is the main reason I have found, that people that should be fired are not fired. Those of us who are good enough will quit and find a better place to work. Not that I am angry or anything.