I just finished reading this article, How to Fire Someone and it made me wonder other people’s experiences and how they compared to my own.
Although I’ve never had to fire anyone (never been an official supervisor), I was fired once. Many years ago, I was one of four medical assistants who worked in a drs. office. I was also the one who had been there the longest and had the most experience. There were a lot of things that happened in a very short period of time, including theft by an employee, lie detector tests given to the entire staff once the theft was discovered, a new physician joining the practice, and three of the other medical assistants who quit within weeks of each other. Once the other three medical assistants came on board, and I trained them, I think it dawned on the management that they were paying me considerably more than the three people they just hired. I was let go shortly there after, without an explanation. It was completely unexpected on my part, and at the time I was very hurt and confused.
I don’t know how well I would, or wouldn’t do, if I had to fire someone.
Many years ago, when I was in my first supervisory role, I had to fire someone. She was a marginal-performing employee and had already been warned about her work ethic. One day she had been scheduled for an all-day training session so was out of the office. The next day, I got a call from the instructor asking if she needed to be rescheduled since she had missed the training. I looked at her time card and saw that she had recorded 8 hours of training time.
So I called HR and they agreed on the termination based on the falsification of her time card. I invited her into a room with me and the HR rep and we told her that she was dismissed, and why.
She went pretty ballistic, accusing me and the HR person of being racists (she was black; I am white and the HR person was Asian-american). We called security and they escorted her out while we packed up her personal items, boxed them and had them shipped to her house.
A few days later I found out that she had borrowed a loaner laptop from the company and not returned it, so after calling her a couple of times to arrange to pick it up and having her ignore my calls I finally had to send the police to her house to get it. I’ll bet that went well.
Fortunately I haven’t had to fire anyone since then.
In my past retail life I fired quite a few people. As the “inventory” manager any employee that got caught stealing store merchandise (i.e. inventory) got to see me for termination.
Most people are really embarassed about being caught and immediately start kicking themselves for losing their job. Once you’ve caught them and they can’t figure out how you caught them it doesn’t take much to make them fess up to other stuff you weren’t even aware of.
Never been fired. Have fired about a half dozen people during my career, all professional white collar types. Lot’s of tears, no yelling or threatening with bodily harm.
Yes. Fired one for being intoxicated at work (as in stumbling down the halls drunk). Easily done for the paperwork, very hard since I knew their life was not a great place. It was their 2nd infraction (1st one occurred before I became their boss).
I have been laid off twice (the dark side of startups), and had to lay people off once myself. Never fun, but I always try to help people out if I can.
I was fired from my first job out of college and my last job.
The first time, I was the wrong person for the job, and it didn’t take long for either of us to recognize it. My boss was so nice about it that it almost felt more like I was resigning.
The other time, well, it’s complicated. And it wasn’t a happy experience.
I’ve been laid off a couple of times as well. Laid off is better. Never had to fire anyone, although a couple of times I was the designated “you’re on really thin ice and you’d better get your act together quick” supervisor. The actual firing was done by the head boss.
I’ve never fired or been fired, but been very close on both sides of the fence. I once committed a pretty egregious sure-thing fireable offense and somehow got off with a warning. (I quit a week later). I’ve also delivered a final warning to an employee that, while underachieving, I didn’t think deserved to be fired. But my boss hated the guy and wanted him gone. So that was an awkward conversation. And my boss joined that conversation so it wasn’t like he just sent me in there to do the dirty work. That guy also quit shortly after his warning, which was made clear was only a formality so we could fire him soon.
Once in college, I was sorta kinda fired… I was working two jobs and juggling a full class load and had missed a second shift in one week at one of the jobs. The supervisor kind of suggested that maybe I was taking on too much and I agreed. I’m sure I would have kept the job if I’d insisted on it, but I really was at a point of trying to figure out what to drop.
The rest of the times has been me as the employer. The only one that involved tears or much drama was actually an employee I was trying to keep, but who was clearly not suited to do all of her job duties and I was trying to explore options for reduced hours/reduced duties. She kind of freaked out and stormed off.
The others were fairly matter of fact. By the time I get around to firing someone, everyone already knows there are issues and I think that helps.
I’ve never had to fire anyone just because of downsizing, outsourcing or the like.
Been fired, also fired people. Neither’s fun, but I disliked firing others less than being fired. Fired 9 people in less than 12 years as a manager. When folks can’t do the job or obey the rules, after multiple attempts to educate, re-train and warn, there’s not much else to do.
My being fired oh so many decades ago now was quite educational, and led to me making significant positive changes.
I’ve never been in a position to fire anyone, but as a HS kid I was fired three times. It was not pleasant especially since the first one came after someone lifted the little box containing the sales taxes (that’s how it was done in 1950) and the SOB simply didn’t believe me that I hadn’t done. A year or so later he died in his sleep of a cerebral hemorrhrage. I had a moment of schadenfreude.
The second was embarrassing. A druggist hired me for the summer because he wanted to take a nap. A guy came in, looking for a box of rubbers (condoms), but was embarrassed to ask for them from a teenager. He hemmed and hawed pointing to a place under the counter and I hadn’t the foggiest idea what he wanted. He left, but he must have complained to the druggist who then let me go. Only afterward did I realize what that guy wanted. It was, by state law, illegal to leave a pharmacy unmanned as he had done.
The third time I worked for about five months as a stock boy in an auto parts store. Then I was let go with no explanation.
My daughter manages the copy editing office for an academic publisher. They don’t pay very well and the copy editors are always leaving and she is always hiring. But sometimes the people she hires just don’t work out well, mostly because they cannot follow instructions and use their own ideas on editing. So she lets them go. She hates doing it, but has to.
Neither of the seats on either side of the desk is a pleasant one.
My first job out of college was managing a book store. We had 7 employees, one of whom was a male. We had a tiny bathroom just off the sales floor so that anyone who was left alone could make a quick trip to the loo if necessary without leaving the store. Our male employee was a very inaccurate pee-er, to put it bluntly, he couldn’t aim. And what made it worse is that he never cleaned up after himself. So after numerous complaints from the female employees about finding the bathroom in a nasty state, I had to speak to the male employee (lots of fun for a 22 year old) and ask him to please clean up after himself. It was ignored, so I had to fire him. I felt awful, I couldn’t sleep the night before and had an enormous headache that morning. When he reported to work I gave him the bad news. Thankfully, he took it ok and simply left. Whew.
When I moved on to working as a health and safety officer, I occasionally had to fire someone on the spot for a safety violation. It was intimidating at first, but I quickly learned to take the biggest, baddest, union guy on the block along with me.
Now, as an HR manager, I participate in lots of firings. Most are necessary, some even “about damned time”, but I always think for just a moment about their wives/husbands and children and how they’ll be affected. I think feeling just a bit bad about firing someone is good for me. It is, after all, as much a fail for the company who hired the bad employee as it is the bad employee in many cases. We should always remember that and make every effort to get a better person next time.
And yes, I have been fired. Once was my own fault. I had a part-time job and I kept reducing the amount of hours I was available until I was only working 4 hrs a week. They figured I wasn’t interested in the job (true) and fired me. At first I was shocked, but learned a good lesson from it. The second time I was a part of a group that was fired. They fired the entire group because there was theft going on somewhere in the group and they couldn’t isolate the perpetrator. So they just cleaned house! I was stunned, hurt, and angry, but I hadn’t known who was doing the dirty deed, so couldn’t have ratted them out to the company even had I desired to do so.
I was fired from KMart when I was in college. They did it within the three week trial period, so they didn’t have to give a reason. I believe all KMart’s subsequent problems can be traced back to my dismissal.
I’ve never fired anyone, despite being a supervisor, mainly because they’ve all been interns so there’s not much of a point to firing when you can just wait them out. I did cause someone to be fired once though. He was the only person that knew a particular system at work. At some point, the number of tickets for that system got to be larger than expected, so the powers that be decided they needed more than one person to know it and assigned me to apprentice to him. He was really not happy about it and made it nearly impossible for me to get the information I needed. Once I mentioned this to my boss, who stood over his shoulder and made him send me the documentation, I realized why: he was padding his estimates to an extreme amount and didn’t want anyone to know. By an extreme amount, I mean he was estimating tasks that took an hour as a two week long endeavor. I implicity let my manager know after I finished a task in a hour, she looked at it, assigned me another task listed as a week, and after I finished that in half an hour, she just thanked me and gave me something else to work on. Two days later (it was a large company with a lot of paperwork) he was getting marched out the door.
I haven’t been officially fired myself, but I’ve been unofficially fired. I was working on a project funded by a grant in grad school. I’d pissed off the principal (which is never good for your career, even if she was a bitch), so when the funding for that project ended, it was “oops, no more funding, guess we can’t keep you”, even though we both knew there were about three other projects that were funded and looking for a grad student to work on them. Luckily for me the semester was starting and I got a TA position a week later. It was both vindicating and depressing that my boss was upset I landed on my feet so soon thereafter. Hilariously, they expected me to keep supporting some software I had written even though they weren’t going to pay me and had just let me go. That was another conversation that was hilarious to me and upsetting to her.
I’ve never been fired. I have fired people. It sucks, though some were easier than others. The guy I fired who repeatedly used the company credit card “by accident” at strip clubs wasn’t too hard. (I shall leave the inadvertent phrasing for your amusement.)
I have been fired several times. Usually it is a relief as I knew it was coming due to a toxic attitude in the company.
It doesn’t bother me anymore to get fired. I know I can get another job with a phone call. Takes the pressure off.
I have also fired people. Lots of people.
The worst was having to lay off en masse 6 guys on the same day due to a business down turn. Then I had to get the remaining crew together and convince them I did it so they could earn a living and I intended to keep all of them.
Usually when I terminate someone it is because they have screwed up repeatedly and have not cleaned up their act. In this type of case I have no problem pulling the trigger.
The best way to terminate someone is to do a Dragnet. Facts, just the facts
You are being terminated for___________
I need you to sign here, here, and here.
Here are your copies.
I wish you the best of luck in the future.
Civilian side I’ve fired one. I’ve also gotten rid of probably 2 dozen temps who were enroute to being hired in full time (that was the way we hired new hourly workers at that company so they had a job waiting at the end of 6 months as long as they met expectations). I’ve also ended some military careers both for performance and health issues.
I’ve always been guided by servant leader mentality. That makes firing someone hard in some ways. I want to help everyone succeed. I served more than that one problem employee though. I also served all the other people I led who had to pick up the pieces because they couldn’t or wouldn’t do their job.
On my first job I came to the end of my probationary 90 days, at which point I would either become a union member and full time employee or be let go. They declined me. I then worked for another company, which I hated. One day, on a whim, I applied to the first company again, got accepted, worked my 90 day probationary period and got hired as a full time union employee and worked there until the place went down the tubes.
At another place I got laid off but they made it seem as though they were firing me for poor performance. I think it was because I was making more money than the other people in my department. They called me back at a much lower position, which I accepted because I could keep my benefits and vacation, then the whole company went under.
You were specifically trained not to do X. I caught you doing X and told you if you did X again you would be fired. You did X, that means you didn’t want to work here.
I’ve been ‘fired’ It was expected and a mutual parting. I was making too much and he wanted to cut payroll, I didn’t want to be there. I was written up and terminated for coming in 15 minutes late. It was the first write up I’d ever gotten in 6 years. I got to collect unemployment during my job search, It was nice having a few months semi-paid time to remodel my house.
I’ve fired people and it didn’t bother me at all. If they were being fired, there was a reason.
Either they did something acutely stupid and needed to go, or they had been warned and instructed time after time, over and over.
Either way, I feel nothing for people so myopic and self-absorbed that they think a capitalist enterprise owned by others should indulge them into non-profitability.
Back in college, I had to fire a friend of mine and the daughter of my mother’s closest friend. She was habitually late to work because she kept getting caught by a train. The train that crossed the tracks at almost exactly the same time every day.
She was forcing people who wanted to leave to stay longer to cover for her, so it wasn’t just a silly technicality where she could just make up the 5 or 10 minutes at the end of her shift.