"Instead, he said companies should consider race, gender and ethnicity when deciding who to let go."
I understand what this meant in the context of the article, but without context, this seems like a potentially dangerous statement.
I understand what this meant in the context of the article, but without context, this seems like a potentially dangerous statement.
I apologize if I come off as ignorant...Im not sure how these things work in law. However, I can't think of any way that taking someone's personal attributes that they cannot help into consideration when laying others off would result in anything but resentment towards the company.
I'm sure this happens, but it's not been my experience working for healthy companies.
Been through a few attrition rounds myself. The process has always been, every single time: identify low performers, find reasons to fight for them to stay (do they have gifts the company isn't properly utilizing, etc.). Those at the bottom of the list need to be let go, essentially pruning unhealthy/unproductive branches from the tree trunk to keep the rest of the tree healthy.
> The process has always been, every single time: identify low performers, find reasons to fight for them to stay (do they have gifts the company isn't properly utilizing, etc.)
Strongly doubt this is done effectively in anything but smaller organizations. Imagine an organization the size of Google, doing this analysis effectively would involve consulting thousands if not 10s of thousands of managers, some of whom will be on the chopping block themselves. Organizations pretty much never want to telegraph these kinds of moves in advance, and looping that many people in 100% guarantees the entire process will be leaky as hell. Sure these organizations will play games with performance reviews to try to make some attempt at coming up with a more meaningful filter than a dice roll, but the accuracy is at best, questionable, and as we've seen in the recent layoffs a good performance review is a pretty weak form of protection.
Your second sentence even provides a perfect scenario around exactly the kind of randomness that comes into play
> essentially pruning unhealthy/unproductive branches from the tree trunk to keep the rest of the tree healthy.
High performer but working on a product the company has decided to de-prioritize? Bye.
Larger organizations are just groups of smaller organizations. Some perform better than others. I work for a $4B corp, the small divisions I interact with generally get it right. Sure, you'll get an outlier from time to time that's mismanaged (and addressed once that's become clear). But it's usually not a systemic problem.
> Organizations pretty much never want to telegraph these kinds of moves in advance
Organizations don't "play around" with hiring and firing. Believe it or not, the executive team actually does care about employee morale. When you hire you need a plan to keep them, as it impacts employee morale and performance if you hire/fire on a whim. If a company treats it's people badly, it's a sign of a poorly run company, which usually doesn't end well. If you think this is your company, I recommend leaving and finding someplace better. They're out there.
Typically companies are "late" to hire until they are sure the employee is needed long term. During periods of growth, this means that companies are understaffed, and the existing employees have to working harder until its 100% clear the org simply needs more people. From my experience, it takes several months of consistent production overtime before management decides the short term spurt in orders isn't a one-off fluke and actually indicates long term business growth. Only then are new positions created, as the company reasonably believes these people are needed long term.
On the otherside, when it's time to fire, the signs are present for a while that there's been a downturn in business. But companies don't want to fire right away (due to employee morale, reasons above). They will discuss internally at the highest levels whether or not attrition is necessary, can it be avoided etc. Is this just a temporary drop in sales, or is this part of a longer term decline? Until a decision has been made, discussing this with rank and file just creates job anxiety, as no one knows what's going to happen. Once the decision has been made, it's typically executed quickly (that's why they're called executives).
There's a reason that parents don't discuss their problems with their children. Until a decision has been made to divorce, Mom and Dad typically don't tell the kids that they're having problems and might get a divorce. It just created unnecessary anxiety.
So you only hire if you think you can keep them. And you only fire as a last resort. This means that sometimes you're short-staffed and it's necessary for people to work overtime, and other times you've got too many people and you must right size to remain profitable (stay in business).
> Your second sentence even provides a perfect scenario around exactly the kind of randomness that comes into play
Sure, it's never gotten 100% right. There's randomness in everyone's day to day lives. This is why the management layer is so important, it's their job to get it right as much as possible. Every time you get it wrong you're potentially damaging the company.
We can't avoid randomness. Everyone takes a chance stepping outside their front door in the morning and driving to/from work. Companies deal with randomness as best they can, just like we do in our day to day lives. This is reality we're dealing with, not theory.
> High performer but working on a product the company has decided to de-prioritize? Bye.
Yes. If a company isn't making money on a product they have to cut the product. So what to do with the team?
Many times high performers are "found" positions in the company, as the company recognizes their talent is hard to come by. This is easily done when one side of the business needs people, while the other needs to be downsized.
But if the company is oversized in all departments, there's no place for the high performing talent to go. Its not fair to fire a "good performer on a successful product" just to have a position open for the high performer. Sometimes it happens, sometimes not, but guaranteed someone is hurt every time.
We've lost some talented people, in much needed positions, and been unable (due to hiring freeze) to hire a replacement or greatly increase compensation to get them to stay. As much as you want to keep talent, sometimes it's just impossible.
I've nearly always found it to be the case that high performing talent quickly lands on their feet. They are in demand, even if their former company can't use them. I'm hearing stories right now that talented people are getting jobs fast in spite of the recession and rounds of layoffs.
Lastly, personal agency is also involved here. Any job you take comes with risk. Everyone, talented or not, should weight the risks of the position being offered against the benefits being offered. A high paying job offer at disruptive new company may not actually be better than the lower paying job offered by stable company. Being a high performer doesn't guarantee job security, just makes it much more likely.
I think this upside-down view of diversity being located in individuals is really common though, which is one of the problems with tech DEI initiatives. But you get much more use out of it the other way around.
Right, the term has no inherent abstract usefulness, it must be defined in each specific case. You can assess diversity of a group on a certain axis, but not generic "diversity" without defining it.
But you're still thinking of it as something possessed by an individual and that's making it hard to see the value. Adding a specific person may increase the diversity of the team on a certain axis, but that's a trait of the team not that person.
> as that is the only way to really make it fair in the long run.
I don't think this is wrong, but the way you state it makes me think there are several assumptions under it that are worth prodding at. Like, is fairness the goal? To whom? only the members of the team being discussed, or all potential candidates, or society as a whole, or what? Or, what is "performance?" and defined by whom? If a member of the team underperforms their peers on technical assessments but, for example, speaks an uncommon language that gives them access to and business-valuable insight into their users, is that performance? These are judgements that need to be made, not objective facts that can be derived from the world.
I don't know of anyone seriously proposing that "diversity" be the sole deciding factor in a hiring or firing. But that assessing the overall diversity of a team on certain axes can surely be one of several things weighed when making these decisions, along with things like tenure, performance, communication skills, morale, etc.
Is it both legal and ethical to prioritise specific groups when hiring, with the aim to improve diversity?
Is it therefore both legal and ethical to use the same metrics when conducting layoffs?
Though this is not my field, it somehow seems more unfair in the latter case?
As the reply above said, D&I isn't about "Don't fire minorities", it's about "If you fire 10% of your workforce, but they end up being 30% of the minorities in your workforce, question why there's a disconnect"
The idea being is the 10% actually where 10% of cuts need to happen, or is the 10% including some business unit that didn't have the right people hitting up the after work pub crawl with the founder, so no one one felt personally connected enough to have them stick.
-
And I feel like the kneejerk is to assume "oh well you're just assuming founders are discriminatory"... it really doesn't have to be a discriminatory thing, it's simple human nature.
It's hard to trust someone who thinks that they won't subconsciously lean away from firing people that they've spent more time with and happen to like. They should accept that camaraderie outside of the bounds of business can subtly affect affect business sense even if you are a fair person before you can consciously override that tendency.
Similarly even though they're not sexist, they're not a T-1000 and are subject to things like same-gender preferences that have been replicated time and time again: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.0186...
A large part of D&I is supposed to get people to embrace uncomfortable hidden biases without jumping to the least charitable cause: You don't have to be racist to get along better with people who are from your culture when that often means sharing interests, understanding each other better, etc. You don't have to be evil for that to end up affecting your decision making subconsciously.
To be honest, the context doesn't really help much.