From what I hear, it sounds like in US you are immediately considered an enemy spy or saboteur and need to be escorted by security. I can't imagine how chaotic it must be to take over work from someone who was fired like that.
Being escorted off site would seem really bizarre. You were trusted to the utmost a second ago, now you're Bill Cosby all the sudden.
I think the "escorted out by security" might be something that happens more in the movies and maybe some very large and impersonal companies. Haven't seen a lot of layoffs up close, but I kind of doubt it's the norm.
Thanks for the data point, because most of my knowledge is from hn/reddit/movies, so I don't know how prevalent this "you are fired, leave the premises immediately" procedure is.
This happens to people who had been loyal employees for 10 years.
America is weird like this.
Obviously you can go find them on LinkedIn and talk that way, but it seems unnecessarily hostile.
Knowing this can happen to me at any time, I make sure that I'm already connected outside of work with anyone I care to know beyond our time with our temporarily-mutual employment.
It's odd.
Worst one I saw was, at the end of the day, they fired the guy who walked out 400 people, poor soul was just the very last one.
It’s not uncommon in finance to have ludicrously long notice periods, but conventionally you are just put on gardening leave as the purpose of it is for your knowledge to go out of date.
However, the company was in such dire straits that they couldn’t afford to just pay people to do nothing for six months and thought it would be a good idea to have them work out their notice. It wasn’t. Those people did sweet FA during their notice and were actively harmful to the company culture for obvious reasons.
I don’t think making it completely impersonal is great either, but it’s best for everyone to end things quickly rather than hanging around.
Yeah, that's a completely different situation. Those employees had employment contracts requiring six months' notice. So they're gonna be paid for six months at the end, and they might as well be producing value for the company the whole time.
Meanwhile in the US we mostly don't have employment contracts. Anyone can be fired/laid off at any time for almost any reason, and that takes effect immediately. The one caveat is that WARN notifications might required 60-90 days notice depending on the state and size of the layoff. But for whatever reason, employers here don't want their employees working for those last months like they would in the UK.
Definitely, but not by escorting people out of a building or sending an email and cutting their Slack access without notice... which is what we see all the time.
Just give the person at least a day to say their goodbyes?
However, I understand that with a massive layoff and a timescale of 6 months it could have turned out far worse than the situation I describe.
To add a data point: Not only have my laid-off colleagues helped to finish and smoothly hand over tasks, but we are now actively rehiring some of them back.
To be fair, the company didn't pull any BS like e.g. Cloudflare telling laid-off employees that they are underperformers. In our case, it was crystal clear that we've lost clients and don't have enough work and money for salaries to keep everyone and that that's the only single reason they are being laid off.
I've never even once seen an employee in engineering go rogue after getting fired.
I've been exposed to this US reality since early 00's and never quite understood where it's coming from. It doesn't seem based on evidence.
If I'm not trustworthy after they fire me, then I couldn't have been trustworthy before either imo. Afterall, as I said we don't have those procedures around here and it's no problem. We would find them weird (culturally).
If you are the leadership and don't take this action and that "rare" small number of people that might do something untoward does do something, then you are left holding the bag. So, as they say, better safe than sorry. I've even be present when actual criminal activity has been committed, but no charges have been brought but the company is still offered the use of actual police during the dismissal/escorting off premise without making an arrest.
So, I guess I'm happy for you that you've never had to experience the darker side of things, but, it's part and parcel around here now of the process.
Are you saying you typically take your company email domain emails (IE, "me@work.com") away after you leave a company?
I worked at Google for over a decade, I'm pretty familiar with their policies and throughout silicon valley.
That would be terrible IT if users had to explicitly back up any of their work. Hardware fails, or gets lost or stolen. Any even semi-competent company should have source control, regular IT-managed backups, etc., such that work isn't lost for any reason.
Also ... why would you need to back up your emails? I can't even imagine a circumstance in which being let go would cause all of your emails to be deleted? They'll just give someone else access to your inbox on the email server if necessary.
I've seen people react unpredictably and emotionally in the workplace, but the layoffs I've seen have actually been entirely smooth. The typical laid off employee is either thinking about the vacation they're going to take (Silicon Valley good times thinking) or how they're going to find a new job (any other industry at any time). The last thing such a person wants to do is trash their own reputation by behaving unprofessionally, and they certainly aren't going to sabotage the employer. But since the managers doing the laying off typically have never done it before, you end up with the kind of weird outcomes described here.