I almost always know beforehand. I’m sysadmin, so I have to be prepared to take them out of the system (never before they’re actually in the HR office being told, thank goodness). Plus I’m one of 6 supervisors here, and it’s usually discussed in the weekly meeting so we all know what person, what day, and what time of day the deal will go down.
The offices here are rather strange, no cubes or short ones in each shared office, so when it happens, the employee being fired is called into an office with the HR supervisor and another supervisor. Meanwhile, a third supervisor takes the rest of the employees from the room and they have a meeting in the conference room. The others are told x is being terminated and they continue to have a meeting while the fired employee is escorted back to their desk to clear out their stuff. That way the fired employee doesn’t have the shame of boxing their personal things in front of their coworkers.
In our workplace, when we still used intercoms, the sure sign somebody was getting canned was when the plant HR person would be paged for an “overseas phone call”. Now we have beepers so this clue is missing.
If the organization is afraid of trouble, as for example happens when somebody is getting fired specifically for having explosive and frightening angry outbursts, one hint is a couple of big guys in cheap suits with odd bulges sitting in the lobby. For some reason, light blue suits are especially favored.
And, like many, we get the advisory email, which says nothing but the fact of termination, and comes out pretty quickly - less than an hour, maybe.
The one firing I’ve ever witnessed was pretty much like that. It was at a sign shop I worked at as a broom boy about twenty years ago. One of the owners came back and started nitpicking the way one of the sheet metal guys was doing something, and it just snowballed into a screaming match until the boss fired him right in front of everybody. It was about two minutes from start to finish. I think we all just kinda continued working like it wasn’t happening, but we didn’t leave lest we miss any of it.
At my current job, the giveaway is when someone calls us upstairs and says, “Can you let me in? The door code thing isn’t working”. Uh-oh.
I worked at company for many years. The way of firing people changed a couple of times while I was there.
Non-management empoyee would be called into HR office, which was a cubicle very close to one of the production areas – no privacy. Within 90 seconds of a firing, or just about anything else discussed in that office, it would be all over the shop. I’d learn things from my employees. I pointed out this problem to the boss several times, and finally (years later) they moved HR to a location away from the work floor.
For management (supervisor and higher), the individual would be taken to lunch. After lunch, the person would be told they are terminated and not to return to the company. Their personal belongings would be delivered to them. This was a problem for one person, who had various papers he wanted (a file containing announcements of awards for top sales, # of new accounts, etc., that might be useful for updating his resume.) When the company cleaned out his office, they simply boxed up the family photos, paperweights, and other things visible on his desk. They didn’t think to go through files.
In the final several years of the company, a time in which we would downsize each year until the company finally was shutdown with production moved overseas, we’d all be corralled in a conference room, and HR would come in and call one person out of the room every 15 minutes or so. We’d shoot the breeze for an hour or two wondering when it was ending and whether we were next. When HR & the plant manager returned to the meeting, we’d get an announcement like, “Jim, Bob, Mary & Sue are no longer with the company.”
I worked at a small business and there were only 5 of us in that part of the building, and two of us got axed that day. They called the first guy up, told him they were laying both of us off. He comes back downstairs and I look at him, and he looks at me, and I just knew. Then I got called up.
Meanwhile, one of the other guys had just started like a month ago and was still relying on the two of us to fill in the gaps with getting to know the business. Apparently he was so shocked he just sat outside and had to be coaxed back in to work.
And to add insult to injury, I had to go picking through the closet to find boxes to pack my stuff in. So no, there wasn’t a lot of dignity there!
I also had a coworker who talked about how they knew someone was getting laid off when the boss asked them to go to the nearby coffee shop with them. Want to go for a doughnut? You’re fired!
Years ago I remember when they let go of a whole department. I had one system that was in their area that I had to use. The entire area was empty of people and I wondered what the heck was going on. After about ten minutes the mail room guys started bringing in empty boxes and laying them in stacks on the floor. I hauled ass out of there quick as I knew what was going down.
They let them all pack their own stuff and leave at their own pace. I remember one gal that came out for a smoke in the middle of her packing and then could not get back in the building as they had already cut off her access card.
Now things are done much differently. We never know when or who is going until after the fact. My own boss was let go and I was not told until the next day in a meeting with a bunch of other people. We were also told then who our new boss was.
When people are let go now they are told they are canned then have a meeting with an HR person and then escorted out. They have the choice to have the mail room pack their things and they can pick them up later or make arrangments to be able to come in before or after hours to pack their own things.
For what it’s worth, I’m not surprised that they didn’t go through the files. I doubt HR would send any company-specific information to him, even if he asked unless he’d somehow managed to work that into a contract.
Lots of companies are cagey about who their clients are, sometimes because the clients want them to be and sometimes because representation of those clients might result in bad PR.
At my old consulting firm there was a guy who pretty much sucked for the whole nine months he lasted. At some point the guy in charge of the office (a company VP) just stopped giving him new assignments, so when he ran of stuff to do, the VP had to “lay him off” for lack of work. (Actually, we really were light on projects at the time, so it wasn’t entirely bogus.) I guess VP decided it was better for him to officially have been laid off than fired.
The way it went down was, on the morning of the dismissal, the VP called a meeting of the department heads, including one whom we shall dub “Captain Clueless”, to let them know what was happening. As it happened, Mr. Suck called in that morning to say that he’d be out for part of the morning but would be in around 10:00. When he got in, he put his stuff down, then headed straight for the kitchen to get a cup of coffee. Captain Clueless is there and says “Hey, _____, sorry to hear you’re getting laid off.” That was how the dude found out.
So, there’s something to be said for letting as few people know as possible. And especially for leaving the clueless people out of the loop.
Same for me, I’m a remote worker, and a contractor at that. I only know if someone’s gone if they’re one of my contacts, and I’d only find out why if I asked someone inclined to gossip, and right now, none of my contacts are so inclined. I live with it. It’s kind of nice to not be caught up in office politics and drama, really.
I get zillions of regular work requests to kill user IDs, but every so often, my manager will call me and ask me to be ready to zap someone with particularly sensitive or privileged access, and that she’ll call me back when it’s time to pull the trigger.
There was one memorable case where they had me wait until after a full backup had been run on a particular server that the soon-to-be-unemployed was working on, just in case they’d left any “Where’s Daddy?” logic bombs. No idea if they did or not - my job ends with “drop user so-and-so cascade;” and fom there, it’s up to the server admins to keep things running.
In my small office I have seen three firings in front of me. One was my ex-boss. This was wrong, because, while he was an asshole professionally, he was a very nice man otherwise, and we all found out before he did. So we had to tiptoe around him for a few DAYS.
Usually though they are just taken into the boss’s office and then come out a little later. Of the three, one left very politely and professionally. The other one sobbed and wailed and carried on and had to be nudged out the door.
I got to see how it worked once… because I was the one getting fired.
Called into a meeting with my manager and his boss, was told I was fired, sent back to my cube with a box to pack up my stuff while my manager watched, then escorted out by my manager.
This was at the corporate headquarters of a large company, FWIW (~3,000 people working on that campus).