The way this is supposed to work is that performance reviews include at least some feedback about areas of improvement. Actually the way it is really supposed to work is that managers give feedback all the time, but that is rare.
Feedback once a year is worse than immediate feedback and feedback when someone gets fired is worse still.
There are lots of reasons not to give feedback at termination. The person is going to feel bad enough - why make it worse with five deficiencies, especially because there is nothing the person can do about it. From the manager’s point of view they don’t want arguments about the fine points. This can go on forever. And will never help.
This wouldn’t have been done without a fair amount of time consulting HR, who does know how to keep the company bulletproof. And judges may not have been born yesterday, but their job often requires them to act like it.
They want you gone? You’re gone. The real reason doesn’t matter at that point, and the stated reason, if they even give you one (less bother and less chance of giving you an opening to challenge it if they don’t, which is why they didn’t), matters even less.
In Thailand, you can be fired for no apparent reason whatsoever, but the employer has to pay compensation unless it’s a clear case of rules violation. There’s a set formula – depending on how long you’ve worked, you get X months’ salary up to a ceiling of, I think, eight months. Plus if the dismissal occurs with less than 30 days’ notice, the employer must add an extra month’s pay on top of that. Of course, salaries, particularly for Thais, tend to be cheap anyway, so getting rid of the unwanted is never expensive, and there are no legal repercussions whatsoever.
No. “Right to work” laws mean you cannot be required to join a union to get a job. Laws that allow you to fire someone for any or no reason are “at will” employment laws.
There are only 24 states with right to work laws, and only one that doesn’t allow termination at will.
He lacked sufficient connections to the good ole boy network of managers? He wasn’t playing golf with the business’s upper management and godfather to their kids? That’s the reason. Every reason you named is “he was not in deep with the people in the know”
For example, if they’ve decided to outsource your department to India then it really doesn’t matter how good you are. You’re not about to move to India and work for 25% of your old salary, are you?
Or another example from my personal experience. I once did Requests for Proposals for a big company - some of these RFPs were for multi-million dollar projects and ran hundreds of pages. Their internal people for this sucked, and they knew it, which is why they’d hire me at all. However, when big budget cuts came along (an internal source said informally they laid off every contractor and 20% of their employees), they decided two things: 1) the quality of the RFP didn’t affect their final win/loss rate enough to justify paying top dollar to prepare them; and 2) they were paying their internal people half of what they were paying me.
So I think it would be a mistake to assume that downsizing had anything to do with one’s past performance. Maybe it did and maybe it didn’t. You can’t know; even if they told you something that sounded true, you still wouldn’t know for sure.
In both of the above cases, it shouldn’t take much imagination to understand why the company doesn’t want to explain the situation in any official way. There’s a lot of potential for bad press - “Struggling company decides RFPs don’t matter!” “Major US government supplier offshores their workforce!” Yeah, that’s not the kind of publicity they want.
If it means somebody low on the totem pole gets a vague answer about why they were fired… welcome to life where things mostly suck most of the time.
I posted about my own abrupt dismissal, but recently at my current company, a manager was let go. I don’t know the circumstances, or what reasons were given, but I’m pretty sure ‘because all the people you were supposed to be supervising disliked you, did not respect you, and thought you did no work’ isn’t something HR wants to tell someone on the way out the door. We all wondered how he kept his job as long as he did, but the firing did come as somewhat of a surprise.
Why would you think your employer owes you an explanation? You got let go for a reason that is beyond your control, so should not reflect badly on you in your job search, and are eligible to collect EI. Would you have preferred them to have fired you for cause?
Sometimes that isn’t even done by, shall we say, “corporate reasons”.
Back in 2003, I and three other Europeans were part of a very large project team working out of the US. Our manager moved on and his replacement’s main job was “to help team members find new positions within the company, as the project winds down”. Do you guys think there might be any relationship between that guy hating foreigners (4), women (1), people with masters degrees (4), and people not of his religion (4), and us getting “unemployable” evaluations? Maybe he was just bad at math, he somehow managed to average items on which evals from our internal clients rated us at 4 or 5 and get 0.
No, I quoted their own words. Everything they said indicated that the reason was clear but was going to remain unspoken. Sometimes people do not want to deal with an issue or issues any longer.
Years ago I worked with a woman who did a decent job. There was one issue with her. She meowed at her desk. It got to be disruptive. She got canned during a reorganization that eliminated only her. Same with the guy who liked to constantly complain about noise pollution. And the guy with really bad b.o. And the girl who couldn’t manage to grasp that “no tube tops” actually meant no tube tops. All of them did their jobs just fine and some were likeable people but there comes a day when enough is enough and you don’t want to argue for the 976th time about how they are wearing a shirt over their tube top so it shouldn’t count, the meowing is self-soothing and isn’t that loud, the effects of noise pollution far outweigh whatever and you decide to have a mini reorganization and eliminate that persons position solely to get rid of that person and not discuss it or put up with it any further.
Of course anyone they contact is going to act sympathetic to their face. They just lost their job.
You got it. We thought she was smuggling her cat in to work until someone saw her let out a meow.
Then the next big thing was everyone trying to covertly catch her meowing. Then came the talks. The bargaining (maybe you could meow silently?) and over time it became too much of a distraction (it went from funny to OMG this is so annoying fairly quickly) and took up too much time to deal with on a regular basis. People who couldn’t block it out had to be moved, a person who blocked it out by playing the radio had the radio too loud for another persons tastes, and on and on. Ripple effect.
It’s easier to can the offender with a b.s. budget cut or restructuring excuse than to keep dealing with nonsense.
Sounds like we had a disruptive employee who was a distraction and negatively affected the environment for everyone else. After trying to make it work with no cooperation from her or effort on her end, we took action and cut her loose.
She’s free to find a workplace that will tolerate that behavior or at the very least won’t be noticed (like an animal shelter) or to start her own company where employees are encouraged to meow often and loudly. Free country and all that.