She’s not being fired for past performance. She might be fired for future performance, and has been so notified.
Except now she’s being told to produce even more. Seems like the manager has made an alteration to the quotas, something which hardly requires a act of congress. He’s free to modify the quota anytime he sees fit.
The OP doesn’t say she wasn’t given a written warning of the change just that she was informed which could include written instructions. No doubt she was producing less in order to justify the pay gap between her and her fellow employees.
Her coworkers need to slow down a bit.
It’s unfair to change the rules in the middle of the game. I voted unfair because even though I am a manager, I saw this from Amanda’s point of view: My productivity was “ideal” but they fired me. But life is not fair and the law does not require the employer to be fair in this regard and the employer has got to act in their own interest. If they can get another 150 producer then Amanda is out. I think employers for this kind of factory work are ruthless about productivity.
What is a rules lawyer? Someone who insists on his or privileges and obligations as defined by the rules? Somebody who doesn’t stand for unequal treatment? The one person who stands up to you when you’re trying to force him or her to do something that the rules say they he or she doesn’t have to do?
I assume so. You can spin it to be a good thing or a bad thing. “Working to rule” is an industrial tactic where employees will only do what’s required of them and nothing else. If they get called to work on a day off for extra pay they will say “no” even though they’d normally say yes because it is mutually beneficial. I think using the rules to stick up for yourself occasionally is a good thing, but doing it for no reason other than to stick it to the company is antagonistic and should be reserved for bargaining.
What does it matter why someone is refusing overtime? An employer shouldn’t be looking behind an employee’s motive. Optional means optional. And if overtime really is optional then a company should not count on being able to get it whenever they want it.
See, this is exactly why everyone should have a union steward watching their bosses. Because when it comes down to it, rules only apply to the people who have the power to enforce then.
Oh, please…
88.7% of all US workers don’t have a “union steward watching their bosses”, and the vast, vast majority get along just fine without it.
Yet another reason it’s not fair: Amanda’s boss is probably not the CEO of the company. He’s just part of the hierarchy of management. Amanda knows that the written policy has, at some level, the approval of the CEO. She doesn’t know if this new policy her middle manager is telling her is. For all she knows, the CEO would prefer to get rid of the guys making 150, because the overtime they rack up doing that is too expensive, and it’s cheaper to pay 18 employees who each make 125 than 15 who each make 150. Maybe her boss is just trying to scapegoat her, because he’s afraid that she’ll get promoted and take his job.
Or, of course, maybe the CEO does want production ramped up. In which case he should change the employee handbook so that it gives a new minimum and ideal figure.
Whatever you call it, it’s a textbook example of the “vitality curve” that Jack Welch promoted while he was at General Electric. Promote the top group and fire the bottom group.
There are way too many arguments pro and con to talk about here, but it comes down to a question of whether you want your employees to be collaborative or competitive.
In a collaborative culture, Amanda’s value is what she brings to the widget team. Maybe she’s exceptionally good at training new employees, or is the only one who understands the legacy system, or always brings homemade cheesecake to the employee parties.
In a competitive environment, Amanda’s job description is “widget maker” and that’s really the only thing that counts. Her lower production affects performance, and that’s a bad thing.
As for why she’s suddenly being challenged, maybe the company is facing increased competition and management has decided, “screw the handbook, we need to boost results this quarter, or else.”
But your hypothetical scenario is incomplete, mate. You didn’t give us all the necessary info.
For example…you never said in your description that Amanda was actually fired. You just said she was warned by a supervisor that she was lagging behind her peers, and was in danger of losing her job.
So…was she fired? How long after the warning? After the warning, did her productivity increase even a little? Or did it remain the same? Also, was anybody else ever fired before Amanda for sub-par productivity?
Might sound like I am nitpicking, but as a former business owner and, by proxy, a hirer/firer…I would need all that info before I could render you an opinion that I feel was credible and useful.
From what you HAVE said, however, if I HAD to offer my opinion on the fairness of her termination, I would say, yes…it most definitely is legal. She would, further, have precious little grounds for filing a wrongful dismissal claim.
Fair? LOL. What does that even mean in today’s business? I would, though, again, say that, Yes, it is fair. Especially to the employer, who should always have the right to terminate a worker who is rendering sub-normal work. As far as fair to Amanda? Hmm…I will offer a tentative “yes” again. She WAS warned. And at that point, if she knew she was already doing her optimal work and could not really increase production, should have been looking for alternative employment.
Hope this helps. Let me know if I can ever answer any more business/related questions for you. I am sort of an expert on it. LOL. My Dad also was a small business owner and I worked for him for years, including in HR.
Cheers.
Yes, and the practice at GE was that employees became competitive, to an cutthroat extent at times. This creates suboptimization–each individual employee is aggressive and productive but the organization becomes dysfunctional because people do not want to cooperate unless it is in their own self-interest to do so. This is what will happen in Amanda’s shop.
The question is whether it is fair to threaten to fire someone who is achieving productivity that was described as “ideal,” just because others are exceeding the ideal. Simple enough to comment on fairness based on that on its own.
I’ve read through most of the thread and haven’t seen this mentioned, so excuse if I missed this point being made.
In manufacturing, there quite often is a “standard” production rate and an “ideal” production rate. These are management terms and are often confused, by workers and supervisors alike, as being what is expected. They are not. The “standard” rate is used to estimate how much labor costs are consumed by each widget. The “ideal” rate is used to plan workflow across the workstation to help avoid bottlenecks and improve workflow through the facility. Changes in either of these to account for temporary efficiency improvements (say, the facility started using a raw material that permitted faster production, but it was of limited supply) is likely to create many more problems that it addresses. A change in the “standard” production rate changes the value of all completed widgets in inventory, for example.
The “standard” rate and “ideal” rate can also be artificially low to absorb unplanned shutdowns or other decreases in production. In most manufacturing situations I have been involved in, it is unexpectedly easy to beat both the “standard” and “ideal” rates. I have seen occasional situations where the “standard” was unrealistically high and could never be attained, but those were mostly in cases where the activity was not a profit center and was typically performed by undocumented labor hours from other workstations. Using line workers to unload a delivery truck, for example.
The point is, the scenario is not unfair if the worker is misunderstanding that the “standard” production rate is the minimum acceptable rate and the “ideal” rate is the maximum expected rate. While management would understand the meanings of these terms, it may not occur to them the need to explain this to the employees (or even supervisors), only to inform them they need to meet the production of their peers to remain employed.
Does Amanda have a putative replacement? Will the putative replacement be given a 100 min./125 ideal goal as Amanda was?
ISTM that “fairness” can only be assessed if we’re told that the standard Amanda is being notified about is actively promulgated to all workers. If she’s being singled out for notification that the handbook does not accurately state the performance expectations (and the OP as written suggests that she is), the situation strikes me as unfair.
Having worked in manufacturing all my life: Yes, it’s fair. Come layoff time, the bottom performers are usually the first to go.
This is part of why I voted unfair. I once worked for a company that employed a manager with some serious emotional control problems who had a habit of spontaneously making up new “company rules” on the spot that applied to the person or issue causing his stress. He then did everything he could to punish whoever broke his brand new rule. Sometimes these rules were sent out in emails to whoever was employed at the time, other times they were delivered in a verbal tirade over the phone, but they were NEVER incorporated into the actual written policies of the company.
Everyone read the same official company policies/rules when they first started, but depending when you were hired and how long you were there for you might be operating under one of a dozen or more unofficial re-vamps of those rules that were mostly verbally sent out to a fraction of the employees. The owner never authorized any of those changes and it’s very unfair to be giving different people different rules in full or partial secret. That’s why you write down your actual rules and make sure everyone has access to them. Anything less and you leave employees guessing as to what they are expected to do; and that’s what’s unfair.
Not saying it isn’t common - that’s not the question. What’s common isn’t what’s fair, and plenty of unfair things have been common through the years (and will continue to be so). But it is unfair to have one set of official rules that everyone hears, and then another set (or several, who knows?) unofficial rules that are sent out to select people in confidence.
Consider the speed limit on your route to work to be 50, posted on the road and in the legislation. Would you be ok being pulled over and given a warning that you’d better be driving 30 despite the actual limit remaining 50? Is it fair to be given a speeding ticket the next week for doing 50 when the signs and the specific law still say the limit is 50?
I look at it a different way…can the company easily hire someone else who can achieve 150 per day, or does Amanda just work with a bunch of high-performers? If 100 is minimum, and 125 is ideal but a typical candidate only produces 110, then it would be not just unfair, but dumb to fire her.
Now, if the company has 1 more person on staff than budget will allow, then yep, the lowest-performing person is going to get the axe, even if they are performing at the “ideal.” Is that fair? Yes, I think it’s fair, especially if, as in the OP, she was told that she’s lagging behind her co-workers.
If she was fired for only producing 125 units without being told that everyone else was outproducing her, that would be unfair.
perhaps but if they have 5 employees making 150 they can get rid of one employee who is only making 125 and have 5 ideal employees instead of 6.