Continuing the discussion from
That’s funny.
Which raises the question of whether HR departments are any more effective at disciplining or firing their own problem children than they are at disciplining or firing other departments’ problem children.
I know we have a couple of HR pros here, but I’m not recalling who.
Anyone care to take a stab?
I know that in a all of of the big companies I have worked at, HR leaders have gone to lengths to protect “their own” just as much as leaders in other functions try to protect theirs.
Two examples: A manager in HR embezzled over $1M (this was over 25 years ago) over a period of years. The embezzler was caught, prosecuted and imprisoned. But his manager suffered no consequences for what was an obvious failure to supervise. The embezzlement involved paying out dozens of invoices for training services to fictitious company owned by his “girlfriend”. His you could spend most of your boss’ budget on nothing for years and not get caught is mind boggling.
An HR employee went ballistic (figuratively) and threatened to go ballistic (literally) on her non HR coworkers. The Chief Legal Officer and VP of Risk Management had to force the head of HR to fire this person.
I think maybe it’s important to understand the role of HR and the whole process of firing people.
For your particular example, it’s hard to fire someone simply because a manager or coworkers thinks they are “useless”. It may seem like a lot of bureaucratic or even “woke” nonsense, but really what HR is trying to do is protect the company from any perceptions of bias or discrimination. So what they would typically do is gather enough documentation to prove that the employee is not only, in fact, “useless”, but also that their managers and coworkers aren’t intentionally setting them up in a way that they can’t perform their job.
Basically HR need a paper trail that supports a narrative that “we gave this person instructions to complete a bunch of tasks in line with their job description and they failed to do it so we let them go”.
But physically threatening someone at work, yeah, that’s basically an unambiguous insta-fire right there.
Unless these people worked in the HR department at NASA or Air Force Global Strike Command (AFGSC) or some other organization that actually has access to ballistic missiles, I think you still mean “figuratively” 
Isn’t this about guns and ammunition?
IIRC, @Odesio is on that list.
Yes. The term “go ballistic” literally refers to the path of a rocket or other projectile moving under the force of gravity. For example - a ballistic missile uses the rocket to shoot up into space until the fuel is exhausted at which point gravity pulls it back to Earth (in an arc-shaped flight path) and it lands on it’s target causing great destruction.
IOW, this HR person did not “literally” shove their colleague into an ICBM and shoot them into space.
I was making a joke at your use of the term “literally”.
Mighty_Mouse said the worker threatened it. So he could have literally told him he was going to tie him to an ICBM and launch it without actually doing so.
Except that he was using it correctly, by insinuating that the co-worker threatened to shoot up the work place.
Well, in every dictionary entry I found in about a minute of searching, the term ballistic also applies to the motion of projectiles as fired by a gun as well.
connected with ballistics (= the study of the behavior of objects that are shot or thrown through the air, such as a bullet from a gun):
None of the defendants could be linked to the fatal gunshot because of a lack of ballistic evidence.
They established a ballistic “fingerprinting” database to help law enforcement officials trackguns throughout the state.
Definitions of “ballistics”
The branch of science that deals with the behaviors and dynamics of projectiles such as bullets during their flight
The specific qualities and behaviors of a projectile, like a bullet, during its flight
I didn’t look in a dictionary because I didn’t need to. The use of ballistics to describe guns and bullets is commonplace. It is is somehow “wrong” because of some etymological reason, that’s just dumb. Words mean what people mean when they use them.
I’m not in HR, but I do spend a lot of time professionally studying how companies work. I do have some professional expertise in corporate fraud (detecting…not committing).
In this case, to what extent the manager was culpable might depend a lot on to what extent the employee concealed their fraudulent activities and what controls were made available by the company to prevent such fraud. Like if the whole department runs off of Excel spreadsheets or even paper (quite possible prior to 2000) and the employee made great lengths to discuss their fraud as legitimate expenditures, a strong case might be made that the manager is as much a victim as the rest of the company.
As for the OPs questions, here is my theory:
In spite of commonly held beliefs to the contrary, HR in general doesn’t like to fire people. Their job is to protect the company and firing people has the potential to lead to lawsuits and bad PR. That goes for perpetrators as well as victims. Especially as perpetrators of HR-involving behavior are more likely to be senior executives with contracts or significant power within the organization.
So I think what companies will typically do is wait until a periodic reorg or until an employee misses some hard metric a few times (like billable hours or sales targets) and then dismiss them along with any other “underperformers” and misfits.
Also corporations tend to operate like little feudal aristocracies. Once you get into management what constitutes “performance” is a bit more abstract. Sure sales, delivery, or professional services organizations have hard metrics, but a lot of groups don’t. So what constitutes “performance” is mostly based on whether your manager likes/needs you.
That is unless a person commits an “insta-fire” offense like stealing, threatening violence, some grotesque public display, or whatnot.
Oh yes, that would be a correct usage. I hadn’t considered that.
I assumed @Mighty_Mouse meant “literally” went ballistic like “just got really really angry”
Sometimes? At my current employer, I’ve seen some problem children get the axe over the years. We’ve had at least two recruiters who were let go because they didn’t respond to hiring managers or complete tasks in a timely manner. We have a progressive disciplinary policy, so these terminations didn’t just happen by surprise. We had another HR employee who just stopped working so he was terminated.
Other times the problem child just proved to be a persistent thorn in our side. We had two HR Generalist, one of them great and the other horrible. The horrible one would often shirk her duties, was rude to employees, and this eventually drove the other generalist away because she was essentially doing the job of both. This went on for quite a while, so their manager at the time really needed to do a better job of keeping track of them. Eventually problem child did improve, but she did get a warning for being rude.
A few years back I had a person on my team who handled leave (FMLA, STD, LTD, maternity, etc., etc.), which is both complicated and something you have to take care of in a timely manner, and didn’t understand the law, company policies, or our procedures. When we all started working remote, I could send him a Teams message at 9:00 AM and might not hear back from him for hours. I suspect he wasn’t working. I could tell my boss was frustrated by him, but he never got written up. When he finally quit, it became clear he really checked out months earlier as he stopped doing his job.
Overall I don’t know if we’re better at policing our own. The cobbler’s kids are shoeless, right? My current supervisor is great, but she does need to be a little more willing to be the bad guy when her employees are out of line.
It’s not just that. Turnover is expensive. It costs money to hire someone, it takes time for them to be productive in their new role, it causes stress among other employees, etc., etc. You’re right, we don’t like to fire people, and I can only think of a handful of times where I’ve enthusiastically recommended termination.
I think I’m missing a key point in the OP’s question. AFAIK, HR does not decide to fire people. They are called in by the management involved to ensure everything is done legally and run interference between the company and the now ex-worker. LSLGuy are you talking about conducting investigations as in covering up for people in their departments?
If you are a Director of Training and have a budget for Training of $500k a year and the actual training being delivered is worth $100k a year, because 80% of your spending is to a firm that never delivers any training services or materials because, you know, they don’t actually exist, then you are not a competent Director of Training.
Imagine a store manager who misses that 50% of the payroll he’s signing off on is ghost employees. Not just for a week, but for months and years. Payroll is the same, but the number of employees has dropped by half. “Because our control systems aren’t great” is not going to save you, unless you are in a very cosy relationship with your bosses. Or maybe if you are hiring consultants, whose output isn’t measurable by mere mortals.
What I mostly meant was that there is a perception that HR takes the corporate CYA to great extremes.
Such that no matter how much a manager wants to terminate a problem employee, HR keeps inventing the need for more proof, more counseling, more additional chances, etc., rather than permitting the department (and company) to cut its ongoing losses over this loser / scammer of a worker. They’re focused on the one-time hassle and cost from one-time worker replacement, rather than the ongoing hassle and ongoing expense of non-productivity from ongoing worker non-replacement.
My thesis was that HR would be living up to the reputation above, unless the problem employee was in their department. Wherein they (HR) would be suffering the downsides of a troublesome worker, rather than being loftily unconcerned about how much trouble the bad worker was making in other departments.
Once they were themselves directly feeling the pain of a crap worker, suddenly the risk to the corporation of lawsuits would seem far less, the cost of one-time replacement would be recognized as being far less than the ongoing costs of retaining a problem, and somehow Joe/Jane Useless-Troublemaker would be out on their ear after a quick write-up or two. If that much.
That was my thesis, if stated a bit too telegraphically. My question is whether that’s simply a fever dream of my raging cynicism, or is something that really happens often out there in Bureaucracy World?
You just answered your own question. $100k in training materials and another $400k in “consulting services”.
Keep in mind one of the problems when it comes to talking about HR is the same as it might be when talking about IT, Accounts Payable, or any other department. We have thousands upon thousands of businesses here in the United States and where one IT department might be great you might have another that’s horrible.
A progressive disciplinary policy shouldn’t make it difficult to get rid of bad employees. The problem I run into on occasion is the manager doesn’t bother documenting anything. They tell me an employee has been a problem for a while, low production maybe, and when I ask about the paper trail they stare at my like cattle ready to be poleaxed. That’s not an HR problem, that’s just bad management. I personally don’t care how much a manager wants to fire someone, but I do care about following policy. If a manager can’t be bothered to actually manage then that isn’t my fault.
But to better answer the OP’s question, those people I talked about who were terminated, we followed our own progressive disciplinary process. They received warnings and had the opportunity to clean up their act before they were terminated.
Quite true. I didn’t mean to impugn the entirely of the USA’s HR community.
Very well said. I’ve certainly worked around, if not under, managers who would gripe about bad employees, but do nothing more than that griping. “Eww, it’s too hard” is certainly a convenient complaint. Just not one any skilled manager should succumb to.