We have two guys at work that should have been canned a LONG time ago. My boss (the CIO) called HR to find out the protocol to terminate one of the guys’ employment. The conversation went something like this.
CIO: So and so is underperforming and has been for over a year. With the economy as it is, we really need to let him go. What is the protocol for that here? We’d like him terminated next Tuesday.
HR: Well, uh… hmm. Is so and so on a performance review plan?
CIO: We have his review for the past two years. On a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the best, he’s scored a 1 each year.
HR: That’s not what I’m asking. Has he been placed on a special plan to give him the flexibility to grow into his position?
CIO: No, he’s had nothing special. Nothing that any of the other guys in his group has had.
HR: We need to get him on this process.
CIO: I want him fired. I don’t want him on a process.
HR: We don’t do it like that, especially that he’s in a protected class.
CIO (perturbed): What?
HR: Yes, he’s over 40 years old. We have to be careful.
CIO: Careful? He’s getting paid $85,000 a year to do absolutely nothing. He doesn’t care about missing deadlines or being a good employee. He’s costing us money and I want him off the books.
HR: Well, put together a plan and have his manager document everything. We can possibly let him go in 6 months.
CIO: This isn’t reasonable. I’m going to talk to Rick (the CEO) .
I was in the room for this conference call. The CIO held it together pretty well, and I think I would have lost it. The CIO, the Chief Information Officer, is a company executive and has about 500 people under his employ. He’s a company officer with the power to do just about anything he wants – except for firing someone. The strategy now is to arrange for a lay-off of one. So, he’s gone either way. But jeez, I would have thought he superseded HR.
Thats because you have an overly cautious and possibly stupid HR department. Only one company I have worked for has had a process like that. Consequently the company was full of incompetent idiots and deadwood. Every other company I worked for, when the Director level or above wants you gone, you are gone that day. No explanation needed.
My husband became a government employee again a couple of years, and had a real problem employee under him. The government, of course, makes firing someone even more nearly impossible than private employers, especially since this person was in three protected classes. The person was put on a performance improvement plan, and my husband had some long talks with her about her problem behaviors – and to everyone’s shock, once she was finally treated like a person with the capacity to improve and learn to do her job well, she did. She’s been a solid employee ever since.
So sometimes the plans do work. But I suspect that’s more rare than otherwise; usually it’s just a way of laying a good paper trail to justify the future firing.
Usually I’ve heard these referred to as “performance improvement plans.” That’s a nice Orwellian name for them. Having run across a few in my years, they seem to be more of an HR template for termination. I’ve seen terms in them like, “must notify supervisor upon arrival and before leaving,” “must give daily status updates,” “must give hourly updates,” (I guess when there is an immediate work “crisis”), “must notify supervisor before taking breaks and after returning,” etc.
The point being, in the ones that I’ve seen, there was nothing documented about how much leeway the employee had, so, if your supervisor thought that you were worth keeping, and that you had indeed turned things around, they might give you a pass if you weren’t to the letter on some of the nit-picky things.
However, if the supe wanted you outta there, theoretically, all they had to do was document a time when you didn’t tell them your whereabouts when they came looking for you. Don’t know that any of the termination cases that I’ve known about were for something that minor–but they were pretty much all people that I strongly suspect the supe was ready to ship out. The PIP was to formalize the eventual process.
It sounds like this guy is not the only one at the company not doing his job.
There are good reasons to have a process, and not just cya against government prying in. It sounds to me that his managment chain are all not doing their jobs. If someone is underperforming, it is the manager’s job to identify the issue, communicate the issue to the employee and work out a path to resolution including measurable criteria to determine to whether escalation is needed and to determine if the issue is resolve. This is regardless of any protected class. Hiring new people is expensive and having people who don’t pull their weight is expensive. If a manager is not taking steps to identify underperformers, they are not doing their job. The reason for having criteria for when the issue is resolved and communication with the employee over expectations is that The best, cheapest, outcome is that the employee does his job. If he continues to underperform, having clear criteria makes the path to getting rid of him easy to follow as well as gives him an incentive to do better.
Another reason to have a process is to avoid losing good people for stupid reasons. Having reasons and criteria written down discourage things like managers firing someone at a whim or for a reason that would not fly with the company. Say a manager decides that an employee is no longer hot enough, give them a bad review twice in a row and fires them hoping to hire someone younger and hotter.
The failure here is the incompetent employee’s manager(s) who didn’t document his sub-par performance and put him on scheduled performance reviews with a clear indication of what acceptable work performance was and what it was not.
Managers HATE doing this kind of paperwork but if you want someone out without running a very real risk of liability, then that’s what needs to be done.
Of course everything you said here is true in theory, if you didn’t know the players.
The person in question (let’s call him Mr. Stupid) is 46 years old and from what I can tell, has exactly two brain cells. He’s been with the company for about 10 years now. I know the person who hired him and that manager is widely-known to be a very poor manager – oftentimes his employees dislike (to the point of disrespect) and/or ignore him and much of his department is usually in disarray. The problem here is that this manager’s got something on someone, because complaints about him usually fall on deaf ears. HR doesn’t address this (of this I have knowledge). There is no plan for this manager.
Now Mr. Stupid has been under his new manager (let’s call him Bill) for 2.5 years. Bill is respected, knowledgeable, and very good with this employees. He runs his department like a well-oiled machine and has been documenting and slowly removing work from Mr. Stupid’s tasklist as it wasn’t getting done. So Mr. Stupid does nothing all day but garbage work for which we usually hire temps. Bill has all the records. I’m going to urge Bill to go to HR with what he has. I don’t think the CIO was completely effective on his approach with them.
This sounds good in theory, but if you want people to perform for you beyond what is exactly stated, it seems you have to be able to offer them some sort of loyalty. Why work hard for a company if they make it clear they could care less about working for you?
The two things are not mutually exclusive. You can build employee loyalty by offering excellent compensation, benefits, profit-sharing, bonuses, etc. in exchange for good work, regular feedback on what the employee can do better, professional development (e.g. training for new skills to make them a more valuable employee) and so on. None of these things require eliminating the ability to fire non-performers at will.
Obviously, it’s not good business practice to strut around the office, Craig Ferguson-style, yelling “Johnson, you’re fired!” at every opportunity. But it sounds like the guys in the OP have been given plenty of opportunity to to improve and have failed to do so.
It sure doesn’t seem that difficult to fire people in my company these days. We’ve had about 150 let go just in the last week. My office is down from 30 to about 12.
Anybody who was remotely considered extra weight is gone. They even got rid of our receptionist!
I agree. I worked in government for years and even in that environment there’s no excuse for allowing poor performance to go unaddressed and getting stuck with a unproductive employee. Doing regular performance evaluations and setting goals and expectations is a big part of any manager or supervisor’s job for all of their staff, not just the problem ones. The goal is to help them know what the expectations are and help them perform better, but the same steps lead to having the documentation needed to terminate them if it comes to that. In a union environment you don’t have a chance of firing someone without going through all of the steps.
Yes, but “just” treatment doesn’t cover being fired, for any reason at all (unless there is a contract between you and the employer that he is violating).
It’s insanely difficult to fire individuals these days. Firing a hundred, or three hundred or a thousand or twelve thousand… no problem.
I’ve had co-workers over the years who were in the “can’t fire them cause they’d sue” category. Usually it was due to a minority status or a (real or perceived) disability or “reverse discrimination” (a white guy threatening to sue alleging “reverse” racism… from a white male manager).
A couple of employees did indeed make good on their threat when finally fired, but in both cases the judge ruled in favor of the company (especially one alleging racism in which former black employees of the company actually came of their own accord to say “she was fired for being sorry as hell, not for being black”.) The other was dropped when it was ruled that if indeed he had a disability he couldn’t prove it and had never notified HR (and even if you’re a quadriplegic in a wheelchair you have to fill out the paperwork before you can be legally protected).
Hope you find other work soon and that it’s even better than what you had.