Survey: Is firing people a bad thing?

Great Debates
21

To use words you’ve used in other threads: yes, firing is brutal, traumatic, and metaphorically bloody.

That describes a violent act. It also describes surgery.

If someone is fired because of legitimate performance or workplace issues, where they’re having a negative effect on their coworkers or their employer, then it’s a good thing.

I someone is fired because of petty vendettas or on a whim, then it’s a bad thing.

I’ve worked in an office with someone who should have been fired (actually, she shouldn’t have been kept on after her 6-month probationary period). She was incapable of doing her job well. Other people had to help her out. She had crying jags, knowing she wasn’t doing well, and her boss had crying jags, frustrated that the work wasn’t getting done and feeling guilty about having to write her up and have disciplinary meetings.

Going through the formal documentation process and followups took months. While she was a nice, kindhearted person, she was not competent to do her job. No one took pleasure in her finally being fired. But it was still a good thing for the office, because someone competent got the job and the drama stopped dominating every day at the office. The overall mood improved within a couple of days; work was more pleasant for everyone again.

Was her firing a good thing? Yes, from the perspective of everyone else in the office, even those who liked her and wanted her to find a new job soon. No, from her perspective. Yes, from the perspective of the person who came in and kicked ass at her old job.

It’s just not that binary a question, and the fired person’s perspective isn’t the only valid one to consider.

22

I agreed with 99% of your post, Dangerosa, but the first clause in the above sentence, I have issues with.

Companies, and especially corporations, exist for no other reason than to increase profits. If my firm earns $10,000,000 this year, one might say, seeing that number in a vaccuum, that’s great. But if that company earned $15,000,000 last year, it is not good, and investment markets (including any banks you might go to for financing) will hammer you. And this doesn’t matter if it is $10,000,000 or $10,000.

Good management (which, like in most things, there is plenty but you rarely hear about it) will find the best way to achieve the companies overall goal (increase profits) with soceital good, including providing good paying, benefit earning jobs. But sometimes, you have to reduce jobs to remain profitable, and that includes increasing profits.

23

Firing is an important and necessary tool for the management of a business. Tools can be used well or used poorly, depending on who is using it. A firing under proper circumstance frees up a job from someone unsuitable and gives it to someone who may make more of it, this is a good thing. A firing under lousy circumstance still results in another person getting a job, but it is unfair to the previous worker. Even layoffs, if they are justified, result in a stronger core company, helping to secure the jobs of the remaining workers. If a layoff is not justified, people will be hurt, and it won’t really help the rest of the force.

It’s still just a tool though, morally neutral, it really comes down to how it is used on a case by case basis.

We do have a variety of resources available for people who lose their jobs, they are not lavish, but usually people are able to get by for a while on them until new work is found.

24

There is no hard and fast rule for who gets fired. It depends on the situation and the objectives of the company. Performance related firings happen at any level. I have seen at least two mangers or above level employees at my firm get fired for exacerbating poor performance a with a bad attitude. Middle management is highly vulnurable to layoffs, especially after a merger or restructuring. Most companies don’t need two Director of Accounts Payable.

Some companies like law or consulting firms have what they call an “up or out” policy. If you reach a level where they feel you no longer have the potential for advancement, you are “counseled out” or asked to leave. Other companies routinely let go of the bottom 10% or so performers.

Firings and layoffs are a routine part of business and necessary to maintain a highly adaptive and flexible economy. The alternative is that we all pay to subsidize businesses indefinitely until their employees die or quit on their own.

It is important to have a safety net in place so that being terminated is merely an inconvienience and not a life altering experience (I’ve been let go from many a company, I have always found a better job for more money).

When I was laid off in 2002, I went without a job for six months. I had about another year of false starts, temp jobs and contract work. While it was stressfull, thanks to 1) a bit of a severace package 2) unemployment insurance, 3) realizing in 2000 that the economy was going into a downturn and it would be a good idea to save as much as I could and 4) having a broad set of employable skills I eventually found long term work, didn’t lose my appartment and was able to actually enjoy some of the time off.

The important thing is that employment terminations are necessary, but so are the resources to make sure that those who are terminated can get back into the work force as quickly as possible. I also wouldn’t mind seeing some kind of mandatory severance package as kind of a disincentive for arbitrary layoffs as a quick-fix.

25

So are you suggesting that because some people get fired who do not deserve to, the concept of firing is immoral?
What about speeding tickets? :dubious:

26

Whom are you addressing?

27

You are right, but it still sucks. I think its really rare that layoffs happen merely to create profits - the competitive environment is too harsh for that. And profits created by laying people off aren’t “good profits” unless accompanied by the productivity gains or cost reduction (i.e. offshoring) that makes the labor you are laying off unnecessary or not cost effective - the profits didn’t come from growth and if the labor isn’t replace by technology or cheaper labor, it will hurt you in the end. But when it does happen that you can lay off people who aren’t necessary, don’t manage to turn a RIF into a morale and productivity tar pit which takes every cent of profit out (which can happen) and increase profits, it IS good business, it just sucks (or is neutral) unless you own a ton of stock.

28

As people have said before, many employees just aren’t fucking worth a damn. They either can’t or won’t do their jobs, sometimes they present a liability to the company. What is wrong with getting rid of people like that? Are you saying they shouldn’t be fired to avoid hurt feelings and unemployment?

29

I think you should address the point and analogy made by John Carter of Mars and his analogy of a divorce. That is exactly what I thought of reading your topic here.

There is a huge potential when people break up or divorce. Feelings are hurt, people are hurt financially, etc–very similar to a firing. Much more is hurt by divorce than firings I think (no cite–just my opinion), yet we (and I am assuming you) would never require people stay together so their feelings wouldn’t get hurt would you? These people are all part of society afterwards and many dont’ have support structures in place. Many get remarried and have issues there too—again not much different than a workplace. So I think his analogy is a very good one.

Have you ever broken up with someone? Got divorced? Why did you do that–weren’ t you concerned about the impact on society then? About the hurt feelings of your spouse?

I am curious as to your thoughts about the analogy.

30

Exactly right. Case in point: my father spent some 30 years with the same employer, an employer that changed parent companies several times. One day, he and several coworkers were transferred from their long-time employer to another subsidiary. Three years later, the parent company decieded that subsidiary had grown too fast too soon and Dad was caught in a RIF, along with almost his entire department. Dad was 57 at the time and watching him mail out resumé after resumé, over 100 in all, was painful.

Dad finally found a job with the help of an old friend–they had worked together prior to the transfer–but he had to take about a 50% salary cut.

31

Employees who are harmful to their company and/or work environment? Firing them is the right thing to do, for the good of the company and their coworkers. Human fungii have noone to blame except themselves.

32

**AHunter3 ** asks about protections from firing for unfair reasons. There are quite a few, including race, religion, national origin, disability (real or perceived), sex, age (over 40), filing a Worker’s Comp claim, and whistleblowing. Also, retaliation for filing a discrimination claim based on any of the above. In some localities, sexual orientation, gender identity, and a broader definition of age are used.

There is, however, no national prohibition against random, just-not-a-good-fit firing, but many of the truly “evil” reasons for firing are indeed prohibited.

**mssmith537 ** talks about mandatory severance. In a sense, unemployment insurance is just that. While you are employed, the employer pays an unemployment insurance premium. Then, if you become unemployed through no fault of your own, and unable to find other work while actively seeking it, you can collect unemployment insurance. Incidentally, an employer with a higher rate of unemployment claims will see its unemployement insurance premiums increase, which acts to deter frivolous terminations or layoffs.

33

I guess I don’t have quite the same empathy for long term employees. In many cases, I’ve found them to be the deadest of the deadwood. Those who refuse to adapt. I’ve seen people who will NOT check their email to save their lives. I honestly don’t care if they’re comfortable with new technology or not. I’m sure there are exceptions from company to company, but I find long term employees in lower level postions to often be the ones most in need of termination. Their inflexibilty drives me crazy.

34

From your post http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=351668&page=8&pp=50

But yet, in the “Joan” thread, mental illness was the main reason you kept bringing up.
“Normal” people would have both the mental capacity and the strength to handle a firing.

What exactly is an employer supposed to do beyond years of sanctions and warnings? The Joan fiing is a perfect example. Maureen, and it seems her company as well were as patient and long suffering as a manager and her company possibly can be. If 12 years of being passed from department to department and receiving tons of warnings and sanctions aren’t, in your words “a better job of handling the human cost…”, what the hell would be?

What is it you think is going to do the job with people who think they can do no wrong? Daily, hourly or minute by minute warnings and progress reports on their behaviour?

At some point, imho Maureen’s company went far above and beyond the call of duty to an employee, the employee has to take personal responsibilty. When (if ever), in your opinion is the employee supposed to be an adult?

35

Come to think of it, mental illness isn’t any sort of “Get Out of Jail Free” card. I know someone who once had a job in a restaurant as part of a work rehab program. The program stopped allowing him to go out on assignments after he was caught eating out of a pot.

36

I don’t think as a rule firing is bad. And I will add another benefit of firing, the simple threat of being fired.

In some cases, it just doesn’t matter. Employees can be warned they will be fired if they continue to show up late, don’t complete projects on time, etc. Some continue to do what caused the warnings, and they should be fired.

But in my experience, many people hear the warnings, and threat of job loss, and make the neccessary changes. It might be more common in some industries, or at some levels, but it can be used as effective tool to change behavior.

I inherited an employee who had been promoted up the line because she was very smart, and worked very hard. But as she rose in the company, so did her feeling of being able to say anything she wanted. I would get many complaints from clients she worked with that she was rude, wouldn’t listen to their needs. If she felt they were wrong, she was point that out in way they found very insulting. As the list of clients who would request I send anyone but her to work them grew, my bosses told me to fire her.

I knew my job would be much easier if I did fire her. A good bit of my time was spent smoothing over bad situations that she caused. Part of me would have been glad to fire her. But the fact she was so smart, and worked so hard, made me think I might be able to get her to change. She was only 24, I wanted to give her a chance to be successful.

I called her into my office, and told her if it was up to the people next door ( my bosses) I would be firing her right now. She started to back talk, say that couldn’t be true, and then proceeded to list all she had done that was good for the company. I told her it was a very impressive list. In fact, she had accomplished more than anyone I had had work under me. And I told her that was the only reason I told my bosses I wanted to give her one more chance.

So I told her to think about this. “With such an impressive list of ideas and programs that you designed and implemented, that saved the company money, improved the way we do things, and make us more competitve, think how many complaints we had to receive for the big bosses, who you have made look very good, to want you gone? Small things can be overlooked, we all have different styles of working with people. But you have managed to insult, belittle, and anger so many people, that even with all the great things you have done, you are considered a liability that we can no longer afford.”

She was stunned to hear it put straight like that. She considered herself to be so valuable, that she didn’t have to bother with being nice to people, show respect to others, or make any effort to being someone people wanted to work with.

She said that spending all her time trying to make people like her would slow her work down. She wouldn’t be able to accomplish as much. I told her as it was, it didn’t matter how many great programs she designed, no one wanted to work with her. What use is a great new idea if I can’t convince any clients to sit down with her so she could explain and implement it?

She suggested I make up a new job description, have her design the programs, and send a more people oriented person out to implement them. I told her I considered that, I could make a job like that, but I wouldn’t. It would be a disservice to her. I told her that I thought the reason she had such poor people skills was because she was never required to work on them before. She got by by bullying people. I was going to be the first one to require she change her ways, or she would lose her job. I told her she was smart enough and willing to work, I could teach her to be more people oriented. She said I couldn’t force her to care what people thought of her, and any “techniques” she could learn would just be fake. She didn’t want to spend her time pretending to care about other people. She was who she was.

I told her if she would listen to me, and make the changes in how she treated people, after a while it woudn’t be fake. She would see such a difference in how she was in turn treated, she would want to continue to improve. She would like how it felt to know people looked forward to her coming to work with them. She would like knowing people requested her because she was so good at what she did. She would see all aspects of her life get better. She would like these positive results, and in time find she no longer had to “work” at getting people to respond favorably. It would just be natural.

It wasn’t easy for either of us, but she took the challenge and succeeded in a big way. If I hadn’t had the ability to fire her, she never would have made the effort. And it worked out well for all of us, especially her, that she did.

37

Asking “Is firing people a bad thing?” is like asking “Is sending people to jail a bad thing?”

Of course it’s never desirable. Everyone would like a world where these things weren’t necessary. First, everyone would like a world where no one ever behaved badly enough to deserve these sanctions. Second, for those who need help behaving well, everyone would like to have plenty of programs to educate and set people straight, reasonable accomodations (alternative sentencing policies for jail, warnings and sanctions short of firing for work), and other ways to stop people from making life hell for other people.

But humans are an infinite variety, and at one end of the spectrum there will always be people who either just don’t give a damn, or just can’t seem to connect cause and effect. Nothing you say or do will get through to them. You can give them chance after chance to straighten up, and they’ll come back with the same shit all over again. For them, eventually you have to be able to say “You’re out of here.”

For the less-hard cases, firing or jail may be the only thing that will finally get through to them and make them straighten up. For the others–well, if the only way to stop someone from committing crimes is to put him in prison, it’s better he be in prison, horrible as that is, than be out victimizing people. If the only way to stop someone disrupting the workplace, making people miserable and dragging down business, is to shove that person out the door, it’s better to do that and get it over with.

Is it a good thing? No, if you mean it’s an enjoyable, pleasant thing. Yes, if you mean it’s a sometimes-necessary thing that causes less pain overall than the alternative.

38

From what I can see, no one, or very few agree with you that firing is bad. Normally I would not contribute because it would feel like piling on, but you are taking a survey so:

Yes, the ability to fire is a very good thing. It allows a company to attempt to keep their profitability. The company has a responsibility to its staff and its owners to try to keep the company in business - and yes, to make as much money as possible. Bad employess affect that.

You mention that there is a huge chance for personal feelings to be hurt. This is naive in the extreme. With some minor exceptions, a company is not a social event. It is formed as a way to make money for people. The social contract involved is you work for me and I will pay you. You know going in what you will be paid and you are expected to do good work to earn it. And this is important: You know going in to the situation that this is what to expect, since it has been a part of our social fabric for longer than I’ve been alive. If you don’t do good work you have broken your part of the contract. You deserve to be terminated. People should be responsible for thier actions.

You mention hurt feelings and guilt. What about the hurt feelings and guilt that go on when a poisonous personality infects a department? What about the stress to the rest of the team? Are they not part of society? Should they not have the right to come to a job where they know that everyone will be doing a good job, that no one will be slacking? That no one will attacking them, or talking about them? Aren’t those individuals due

If you aren’t paid what you think you are worth you can quit and find something else… If you hate the job or your coworkers you can quit and find something else. If the company is working you harder than you think they should you can quit and find something else. Do you feel that quiting is evil? It harms the company and by extension those who work there. What if it is a really small company? What if you are a key member of the company? The social and personal harm exists there too. Feelings could get hurt. Guilt could occur.

Is it not fair that if you can quit, I should be able to fire?

If you make it difficult for people to be fired, you will make it difficult for people to be hired. What will happen is, a company will be less likely to bring people on because they will be worried about what happens if the person is a slacker or a misfit or just can’t do the job. They won’t want to incur the expense and the hassle involved with trying to get rid of someone, so instead they will do without. Or they will fill the position with a temp worker, offering even less security than a full-timer who can be fired.

The bottom line is, you must be responsible for yourself. If you are fired for not fitting in, learn to fit in. If you aren’t doing your job, do your job. If you can’t do your job, consider a different career. Stop being a victim.

Secondly: There are already things in place to help lessen the impact. For firings there is unemployment benefits, there are often severance packages. Before I was able to fire an employee I had to put them on a “get well” program. This program was designed by me and the employee. It was meant to allow the employee to improve the things that they were lacking. It gave them 90 days to improve and help was offered by the HR department.

For layoffs, a company will often run a job fair to try to help their employees find jobs. Sometimes a company or the government will help retrain employees to make them fit for other jobs.

BTW, I was told just before Christmas that my department was made redundant. I will likely be out of a job in the first quarter of 06. And that doesn’t change my opinion on this matter at all. I am responsible for me and will find another job.

39

I never maintained that firing is not the only solution at times, in my OP I made it quite clear that sometimes it’s necessary. But the current atitude toward it is that businesses should be able to just dump the social and human costs of this on society. In fact, many appear to be unable and/or unwilling to acknowledge these costs as a real problem (that’s what the link to the Wikipedia listing on unemployment exists).

Also, I think the general wonderfulness of businesses wrt firings may be greatly exagerrated here. I’ve read enough stories about asshole bosses on the Dope to have a well-founded idea that they exist, and that they fire people (among other things) for little or not good reason. I know some of you folks don’t wanna believe that anyone in management could ever be anything less than saintly, but to put it mildly, there exists considerable contrary opinion on that topic.

40

Good analogy. Now, when surgeons work, do they stab at the patient recklessly, dancing about in glee, using dirty bandages, tossing away the offending body part and cursing it and hoping it will die?