This.
If there is a layoff and someone needs to be let go, should it be the least productive worker? Or should they draw lots or something?
What if the reason everyone else is hitting 150 is they are wprking unpaid overtime, or engaging in ethically gray practices? In a situation like commission sales, I can see that happening.
In the workforce, fairness is often in the eye of the person signing the payroll check.
Looked at another way, companies that go above and beyond [the ideal] are awesome. Internally that may mean getting rid of people that technically meet the standards to hire people that can do even better, but from the customer’s standpoint, it makes them throw their money at the company. Just look at Amazon.
As I think about this more and more, I think if I were the employer I’d get rid of the 100/125 thing as a formal policy and use it as part of the training. Explain to new employees that we like them to make 100 widgets a week but within X days/Weeks they should be getting up to 150 a week or so.
An employer is going to want, and rightfully so IMO, to get rid of the lowest producing employee and replace them with a new one and problem people seem to be having is that this is the policy. Make 100 or 125 widgets, keep your job.
In a manufacturer setting, I could imagine shortcutting necessary process steps, like testing or precise setup/cleanup steps. In essence, compromising quality for quantity.
If management is really only managing productivity purely on the basis of numerical output, the question is not “fair/unfair”. The question is “how long before they get sued by their customers for shoddy workmanship”. But I’m in engineering, not HR.
ISTM that would be a different question then. Illegal practices (even when it just involves how employees are paid) in the workplace opens up a huge DOL can of worms.
I’ve been around a long time, I know that firings don’t just happen in a vacuum. In this circumstance Amanda’s supervisor may have been doing her a favor knowing that someone would get fired soon and gave her a chance not to be the obvious target. Just as easily she might not have agreed to go on a date with the supervisor and the whole thing was retaliation. Or maybe she only had the job in the first place because she went on a date with the previous supervisor. There’s usually more to the story than we know from this simple scenario.
Thanks for the responses so far.
What if the line, “Ideal production is 125 widgets” weren’t there, and Amanda was just getting by on minimum expectations, i.e., 105 widgets a week?
In all my years, there’s certainly been a handful of "Are you kidding me, GTF out of here’ situations. But yes, for most people they can see it coming, or at least people that are outside the situation can see it coming.
Look at it this way, if an uninterested 3rd party (ie a ‘no dog in this fight’ type co-worker’) says ‘hey, you should start doing this/stop doing that or you’ll end up getting fired’, the wrong answer is ‘but it says I just have to make 100 widgets a day’.
I know my work ethic is a bit different than most, being brought up in a family business and seeing a lot of different people with a lot of different work styles.
But in the end, if all your co-workers are doing 150% of what’s required and you’re working by the book, you’re next in line to get fired after the slackers that are basically trying to see how many hours they can put in before the boss catches them hiding out back getting high.
Good point, but let’s assume for the hypothetical that everyone is doing it honestly.
“We need to talk about your flair… Fifteen is the minimum, okay?”
Sounds like they needed a convenient excuse to fire her, either because they wanted her gone for possibly unrelated reasons, or they wanted to cut costs in general and she was on the chopping block this time. It’s fair in the sense that at-will employment might apply, it’s underhanded and in the long term she or anyone else is probably better off working elsewhere.
Not just fair, but expected. If I can’t keep up with my colleagues, my employer will find someone who can.
It was her co-workers that moved the goalposts.
The fact that everybody else can achieve 150 widgets tells the company that the 125 mark is too low. Every good company wants to maximise productivity, if they settle for an output that they know is well below what is achievable then they are fools, they should quite rightly react to the facts in front of them and increase the targets.
I think Amanda would be very foolish to claim that she is meeting her target and that getting fired wouldn’t be fair. Its not a game, she can’t meet an arbitrary number and thumb her nose at the boss saying “nah nah, I got 125, you can’t touch me now”.
Yes she hit her target. But also yes she is way less productive than all her peers. One of those facts is more important to the company.
A)I think it’s important to know how all these employee are being compensated/paid.
because…
B)She’s doing 5% more than the exact minimum required by the book while her counterparts are doing 50% more.
Sometimes, just sometimes, it’s also a relief to fire an employee who’s getting to be a rules lawyer and/or just throws everything back in your face or questions everything you say to them If everything you say turns into a ‘but it says right here…’, ‘but last week you told me…’, ‘but when she asked you the same thing…’.
At some point you do have to (find a nice but stern way to) tell them that this is what I’m telling you to do, it’s not a discussion, it’s not up for debate. If you don’t want to do it that’s fine, but you have to punch out and go home.
IME, and ME is a lot of E, if a new employee is already like this, it really only gets worse.
I have a cousin that loaded trucks at a beer company before he retired. If you ask him how many trucks they could load in a day his response is (I don’t remember the actual numbers) “Well we could load 170, but we never did that, we usually only loaded 120 or 130, if we start doing 170 they’ll make us do that all the time”.
BTW, this whole thread reminds me of the scene from Big where he got the office job and Jon Lovitz told him to slow down so he didn’t make everyone else look bad.
I vote “unfair”.
The company set the expectations and she met them. She’s being paid to make 100 widgets minimum and she is achieving the stated goal. I think the fact she isn’t doing as well as others can fairly be grounds for giving others promotions or bonuses over her, but not for firing her.
Consider a more realistic scenario. She makes 125 widgets and the rest of the employees makes between 130 and 160 widgets. She is the worst performer so gets fired. Now there is someone else who is making 130 widgets while everyone else is making between 135 and 160 widgets, this person is the new worst performer and gets fired. Now there’s someone making 135 widgets and they get fired, etc. This is not a sustainable way to run a business. There will always be someone at the bottom, you can’t keep firing them.
If you really require the employees to make 150 widgets then that must be the stated goal and new employees must be trained to the point where they can perform. If they can’t be trained, hire a new one and improve your selection criteria to weed out non-performers. If this process is repeated then you’ve set the goals too high.
You have described the Amazon business model to a “T”. People in the “fulfillment centers” are required to process a certain number of orders per hour. Once they have achieved that goal, the number is increased, and keeps on increasing until you reach failure point, at which time you are terminated.
My father used to work for such a company, IIRC. The policy was that every year, the top 5% got promoted and the bottom 5% got fired. It wasn’t a job/company in the US, though.
In your scenario they’d just keep firing people until none were left. A more realistic scenario would be that the person that was fired would be replaced with a new one that would hopefully make more widgets than the previous person.
But there has to be a reason the expectation was set so low that everyone else is exceeding it by so much. That reason can’t be zeroed out–it makes ir breaks the case.