The bosses who silently nudge out workers
bbc.com
bbc.com
I worked in an agency once where we were unable to renew a contract with a large client. About a month later 75% of the agency was called into the gym for a discussion. Everyone who did not get called into the gym was let go. There was a lot of confusion about who was supposed to be at this meeting and it really was terrible for everyone involved. The people there were good and well-meaning, but that was the absolute worst way to do it.
I'm not sure how this was handled by the woman's manager in the article, but "We're starting to transition your responsibilities. We'll keep paying you, providing healthcare and you don't have to have a gap in your resume, but please look for something else" comes off as pretty respectful to me.
The individual stated they would rather have been fired instead of having to undergo that process.
"Eliza had effectively been frozen out by her employer. Barely a month later, she quit. “It was humiliating – I was made to feel worthless,” she says. “It was the worst experience of my career: I’d rather have been just fired on the spot and paid off than have to go through that.”"
If the manager had simply said “hey this isn’t working for xyz, we are going to put you in a minimal role for 3 months to give you time to look for something else”, that would be generous.
By not telling her, it’s a waste of everyone’s time and money. She figures it out at some point on her own, and feels disrespected (rightfully), that the manager didn’t have the balls to tell her. Additionally the manager hurts the company by having this employee just there for who knows how long.
I think what you propose is pretty similar to the system in place at Amazon (at least ~2019, when I left AWS). It was common knowledge (or at least was widely assumed) that the most likely outcome of a PIP was dismissal, so being put on a PIP was treated as notice that you should look for a new job.
The problem with the person in this article is that there was no communication at all. It was extremely wishy washy.
Btw if you are confrontation averse, you should not be managing anyone ever.
100%, but that requires that their manager be willing to have a difficult conversation with them. It’s not impossible that your whole reporting chain can be staffed with spineless, chickenshit managers.
. . . side with the employer? Employers are not amorphous blobs of cold logic. They are big lumpy sacks full of humans with all that entails.
So it's better for the company if they can convince you to quit.
it is rather generous of you to completely invalidate her opinion/views because they don't match yours.
I guess in her opinion, given a choice of being dehumanized and forced to quit, or being fired upfront she would rather "rip the bandaid off quickly" and be fired instead.
The end result was the same, she left but didn't need to be forced to quit first simply to avoid paying her severance.
People have different experiences, her's was she would rather be fired, perhaps you would rather be shuffled around and forced to quit instead and that is just fine.
I read it much differently:
"In the weeks that followed, Eliza’s professional life became much quieter. Instead of formulating the London-based events agency’s marketing strategy from the office or attending live shows as part of her remit, her main duties now consisted of simply being available between 0900 and 1800, sending the occasional email and completing the odd routine task from home. "
Seems she was doing important work, then made to do degrading work in an attempt to get her to quit.
When she joined, did she apply for a position doing this work? Did she apply for an internal transfer from her current position to this one?
It is astonishing that people such as yourself cant see what is clearly taking place here. She wasn't given an easy remote job.. she was transferred so she would quit and avoid a severance payout.
I'm not trying to be generous -- I don't want to live in a world where it's the norm for employers to rip the floor up from under people. I don't care if some people are so secure in their finances they prefer that world.
Did you read what I wrote at all? SHE had the opinion that she would rather be fired...
In my opinion, she was given a gift. The opportunity to find another job while working with a safety net that would likely last much longer than a severance if it took a while to find the next “right” opportunity.
Several months fully paid for your job search, and no firing on your resume? Sounds very generous to me. I appreciate there would be stress from poor communication about what was going on - but telling someone they should look for another job would be constructive dismissal.
Severance packages go a long way. Last week I randomly met someone who was recently laid of from Peloton. They seemed pretty happy to move back to their home state with a lower cost of living where 6 months severance could last two years.
As I typed that out I just figured out how to sell this idea to upper-management. As a manager it must be hard to fire someone, especially when you know they support a family or just bought a house or whatever. If low level managers knew the people they fired were going to be given generous severance packages, they might be more likely to let go people that are under performing. Which could help the company overall. Though I suppose you would have to watch out for people slacking off on purpose when they are getting head-hunted for a new job.
As a manager by the time I get to the point of termination for job performance or other “issues”, it’s actually a relief. Managing to that point is what is hard.
However, lay offs are difficult, generally because in my experience you know for a long period of time they are coming (as a manager) and who will be affected, and you need to avoid treating those employees you are going to RIF as dead men walking.
If she was that humiliated, she could've quit.
In any case, it should not be "a privilege" to be treated humanely by employers, it should be a right.
I don't see the point you are attempting to make?
They should be fired, but not get what they are legally entitled?
Did you contact the author and ask?
If you've got 3-4 of these in the other hand, that's when you might just need to bring and bear it
I have gotten into discussions about this with colleagues and managers. The managers don't really care and just told me to chill and hang out (below my previous ambition level) and others have pointed out that they keep me around for insurance. Basically sand bag me until needed to fix a catastrophy or oversee other teams, departments, or initiatives that are at risk.
I don't really like it. I have (or used to have) a voracious work ethic that demanded I be busy on high-impact projects 24/7. However, these projects are rare.
Part of it is due to the constant adrenaline rush of being in a startup and having to save the company or a part of it on a regular basis. Sort of how soldiers have trouble adapting to ho-hum civilian life where the problems are mundane and they miss the trench-level comraderie.
Going from a startup where everything matters and you are surrounded by friends to a big company where nothing seems to matter and relationships are tempered by bureaucracy can be depressing as hell.
maybe it helps if you reframe your current situation in that way. apart from that, if you can, i'd look at side projects that relate to your work
If there was ever a situation where it was good and useful to implement last week's employer-complaint-of-the-week, people having two full time jobs, this is it.
Illegitimati non carborundum — Don't let the bastards grind you down.
Start interviewing, then start working, do the minimum required, and keep taking their money. Much easier in a remote situation, not so much if they stick you in a windowless office 9-5... so BYOD, VPN, tethering to your phone...
But no matter what, reject the insult from your brain and move on.
Now that I think about it, as a person in tech, I would rather have this than just get fired. Atleast I don't have to explain to anyone that I got fired or come up with a awkward lie about why I am not a company and looking for a new job.
A complaint is not a negative thing. It is the very driver of the same progress that you want people to recognize. If we'd like more of that in the future, then it is simply good and right to keep going.
If you want to try to do better by letting people keep a paycheck on a lower responsibility role until you push them out, it'd be better to have a system where the offboarding period is explicit, communicated amiably, and transparent. That could just take the form of severance pay, or it could be something new.
If on the other hand you're just avoiding confrontation and hoping sufficient misery will make the problem go away, there's nothing virtuous about this. You don't get to ask for gratefulness in that situation.
From my American perspective --
She had 'probation' extended. - My state is a 'right-to-work' state. Meaning a contract is pretty much worthless, and there's no probation.
She wanted to be fired and 'paid on the spot'? - Paid what? My manager could literally call me up this moment and fire me. For no reason. And I won't get any money, unless the company I work for elected to give me some pittance. There's no legal or societal expectation that they pay me anything.
In my experience, instead of feeling worthless, she should've taken her paid free time and brushed up her resume/skills for her next job.
Maybe, just maybe, some of us don't like to set the bar as low as "let the subhumans die in case of a fire".
This sounds like a perfect opportunity to be paid while searching for a new job. I honestly don't see how employers still see this as a good idea. Please, by all means, stick me at home with nothing to do but collect a paycheck. I'll gladly clock in while filling out applications for a better role.
I would assume that's the point. You can turn over employees without the political headaches of firing. If you fire enough employees nobody will want to work for you (in the case of specific managers) and risk triggering an exodus as people lose faith in the company (and the best most employable employees leave first).
> I honestly don't see how employers still see this as a good idea
Huh? Don't you see that employers do it on purpose to let people go?
> It’s a June morning, and there are fifteen people in the room, four of them fast asleep, their heads lying on a card table. Three are playing a board game. [...]
> These fifteen teachers, along with about six hundred others, in six larger Rubber Rooms in the city’s five boroughs, have been accused of misconduct, [...] or, in some cases, of incompetence [...]
> The teachers have been in the Rubber Room for an average of about three years, doing the same thing every day—which is pretty much nothing at all.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/08/31/the-rubber-roo...
For the US, I read that as "it will be so expensive in attorney time to secure a litigation-proof post-firing outcome it is cheaper to simply pay them to sit and do nothing for the remainder of their contract". Above some amount of money thrown at these arrangements, it might come with consequences: future teachers unions might find long-term contracts or contracts at all rather problematic to negotiate.
I wonder what the union side of the picture looks like for these allegedly problematic teachers?
It's all done through arbitration, so much lower cost than the regular US court system.
>I wonder what the union side of the picture looks like for these allegedly problematic teachers?
I'll bite: why should management just be able to fire people unilaterally? All the union is asking is for the case for firing be proven in arbitration. It's management's choice to take these teachers out of the classroom while the case against them is pending and pay them to do nothing. Just look at some of the cases cited in the actual article: a lady they spoke to got bad perf reviews for two years from a new principal after 20 years of good ones. The writer spoke to 5 unnamed parents from the teacher's school who said that the new principal was good. Is it so obvious that the lady needs to be fired from her job?
Well because employment is an agreement to which both sides agree voluntarily. Workers can quit unilaterally, why shouldn't management have the same right?
Don't get me wrong -- I'm not opposed to workers protections in general, but I think of them as a pragmatic benefit to the broader society. In general, I don't see it as immoral or unethical for either side to terminate an ongoing voluntary commercial relationship.
My threat to terminate this voluntary relationship is that my employer will have some small amount of trouble, probably offloaded onto my ex coworkers. My employer's threat to terminate this voluntary relationship is that I may be kicked out of where I live, made homeless, unable to support my family, etc. Can we really call this a voluntary relationship where both sides have meaningfully agreed?
Again, however I agree some level of worker protections are reasonable for a pragmatic reasons at a societal level, but not because of a power asymmetry at the employer employee level.
Also (as you pointed out) 45 days at 5 days / non-summer month isn't 4 years which seems to be how long the case is taking (3 years of rubber room, 1 year of case).
It was in the time when Tinder and other taboo breaking apps were coming to market, but it's better than the alternative. If it sounds mean spirited, consider it against the alternative of "managing-out" or "pip'ing out" people, which is a terrible artifact of labor law where instead of setting clear expectations and outcomes, it incentivises gaslighting people for months, sabotaging their mental health and relationships with their colleagues, and with knock-on effects for bringing that home to their families. Firing someone with clarity and closure sucks, but the band-aid comes off. Managers who avoid difficult conversations and use passive gaslighting instead can wreck the families and homes of people who are accountable to them. Referring out someone who isn't a fit to external recruiters (outrefer'ing) seemed like a relatively humane solution.
Free to out-referers, subscription fee for recruiters to get the warm leads by city/role and skills. Maybe the time for it will eventually come.
More recently I had an "architect" on a team who felt threatened that I knew more about our tech stack than he did. He would constantly go against my recommendations without giving a reason, and would assign me boring things. If something broke he would spend the whole time trying to figure out how to blame me, instead of how to fix it. In return, I would just say it probably is my fault let's fix it, even when I knew it was someone else's fault, because who cares. I would also be very public about my technical opinions. The result was that management decided our team didn't need an "architect" and we now have a few Sr. engineers instead. If I didn't have that awful experience at best buy 20 years before, I don't think I would have had the courage to stand up.
[1] This is a funny story that I still tell. One day it was slow, he assigned me to wash the walls with a brush and bucket. One co-worker just kept saying "I've never heard of washing the walls. you paint the walls." Another said they would refuse do it unless they had all the appropriate OSHA safety gear. But the best part was that I was just spot washing the dirt and stuff, and the manager came over to me like an annoyed parent and said I was doing it wrong and showed me the right way. He grabbed the brush soaked in soapy water and used big aggressive strokes water dripping down, and so I followed his example. Within 10 minutes he had me stop because the carpet was stained from the paint dripping off the wall, because you don't wash walls, you paint them.
Too me this is a key takeaway. Business is shitty in lots of ways. There’s a million ways the fit could be wrong. Our process of couple interviews and job offer doesn’t always allow for proper due diligence as both parties are trying to sell something. The goal for everyone is should be to make sure you have enough cushions in your finances and other parts of your life that you can politely say “fuck off” whenever or whyever you feel like you’re being treated poorly. Just don’t put up with it. It doesn’t mean walking off is the best solution, but sometimes you try to fix with communication and other things and this is your only option. I have an expectation that people treat me professionally in work. If people are being conniving, twofaced, or yelling and screaming it’s time to go. (I tend to experience yelling a lot. I think the stress/deadlines gets to certain people to where they just like to yell.)
I mostly agree, but it is very difficult to get there, and once you're there it's easy to forget how lucky you got along the way. So I would say the goal should be to have enough cushions to stand up for yourself and others, knowing you could afford to leave at any time.
Sounds like heaven, finally I could get some work done on my side project.
Hey you are not working out for me in this position. How about I keep your paycheck rolling in while you find another job?
here (Canada) what you outline is a violation.
https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/progr...
Changes in Powers or Duties
The most common cases of constructive dismissal are where the employee leaves as a result of material changes in powers or duties. Usually, a main area of responsibility is removed or the employee's duties are decreased; for example, a plant superintendent whose duties are confined to those of yard foreman. Such actions are in fact a dismissal in disguise, whether or not they are accompanied by changes in salary or job title. Commonly, this form of constructive dismissal involves a significant loss of prestige and status as a result of a corporate reorganization or change in reporting arrangements.
Of course, if they didn't change the salary then it could turn out interesting; the customer support folks could demand equal pay as the ex-engineers.
The FT's "solution" was to move hundreds (probably even thousands) of people into call centers and subject them to what today would definitely be recognized as mobbing. A family member went through that - she said that, whoever could quit quickly did, and people who had no alternatives stayed on the job largely only thanks to tranquilizers and other psych meds.
The French managing practice of moving someone in a spot where they will get bored out, if not killed out is called "placardisation," or "to put someone in a cupboard."
Demeaning and morally unacceptable, but something that business majors at French grandes écoles are taught is "une normalité," a given, a fact of business life.
Where can I apply for a job like this?
It’s going to be harder for the employer in the UK (for now, until the shambles of a conservative government finalizes the gutting of rights) and Europe, but it’s far more humane and effective to figure out where the employee can fit within the organization, and if there is nowhere to fit, to give the employee a generous termination package.
Employees who have been constructively dismissed like this need to remember to not sign any NDAs or arbitration agreements on the way out and to document the experience to take it to a labour board.
> In overt cases, this is known as ‘constructive dismissal’: when an employee is forced to leave because the employer created a hostile work environment.
[edit] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/business/global/layoffs-i... [/edit]
The truth is that often when you see a large company with a 5-10% layoff, it's a cleanup of phantom payroll and otherwise low performers.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/business/global/layoffs-i...
If you being "direct" with an employee about their performance rises to an EEOC complaint, you absolutely need to think about what you're doing and why you're doing it.
>Even if everything is above board, just the existence of the case can harm your reputation in the future, like someone who has been arrested and cleared.
I have had several EEOC complaints files against me for BS reasons (I work in a field that works with folks with disabilities, and it can be difficult to separate disability and job performance for some folks). None of them have had findings, and none of them have ruined my career. I'm confused by your statement here.
That's just asking for her to get a second WFH job... or enjoy the time off.
-Fair treatment.
-Human rights.