Could you explain why it's hard? I've never seen anyone run into any kind of difficulty letting go an at-will employee. The manager can do so at any time, for any reason or no reason at all.
This has been my experience at two different companies in multiple cases with egregious underperformance. I suppose if an employee assaulted/harassed someone or was doing something else outright illegal like theft or embezzlement, they would be shown the door immediately. But if someone is half-assing their work and dragging the team down, everyone has to put up with it for months as they get second chances, micromanagement, and other special attention before they can actually be let go.
I think it's due to the litigiousness of the US culture. Yes, US companies can fire people at will, but they can also file lawsuits at will, which are costly (time+money) no matter the outcome.
I was fired once, and there were no PIPs, no documentation, no warning, no nothing. Just "We aren't doing this work anymore and don't need you" and that was that.
And if that employee can show that other people were allowed to wear green shirts without being fired, they can use that to support an illegal discrimination claim against the company.
The reason it takes effort and documentation to fire people is because companies want to have a uniform set of rules that are applied equally to all employees. They also want documentation to support the firing. Having a consistent process, applied equally and with supporting documentation discourages people from even trying to bring frivolous lawsuits.
Having additional process is also a check on managers. Some managers try to fire anyone they disagree with, dislike, or even to do things like open headcount so they can fill it with a nepotism hire. Putting process in place and requiring documentation discourages managers from firing people frivolously and adds another level of checks and balances to discourage gaming the system.
That's not at all true.
> If you get fired, and didn't see it coming, that's a failure in management. You should have _plenty_ of explicit signs of where things are heading, starting in 1:1 and culminating in a PIP.
The thing is, everyone is judged by how much inefficiency they remove. This implies that for anyone to be successful, there needs to be inefficiency in the first place. This means that everyone has incentive to create inefficiency, which can be removed at a later time.
Imagine you have ten workers. They say "if we do ten things then the system will be much cheaper to run, but further improvements will be minimal". The most efficient thing to do would be to tell them to work on all things ASAP in parallel, but this means that you'll deliver a lot in the first year, and then very little later on. This makes you look bad as a manager. A much better approach is to artificially delay the tasks and force them to be sequential, one task a year. This means that from outside perspective, your team seems to be consistently delivering added value through entire ten years.
Moreover, imagine that you value all ten employees, but one day the upper management tells every team to fire at least two workers. At that point you'll wish you had two extra guys sitting and doing nothing because you'd be able to fire them without putting your own deliverables in danger.
Not to mention that as a manager, your prestige is proportional to the number of people below you. This means that you have incentive to create bloated teams that sit and do nothing, because having five good and five bad employees looks better on paper than just having five good employees.
In most companies, information flow is extremely opaque. If you're particularly unlucky then your direct supervisor might know your performance is bad, but other than that, zero chance of anyone noticing. And even your direct supervisor might either be too busy, lack knowledge, or simply not give a fuck, because he understands the business value of artificial inefficiency.
It was incredibly rough- a lot of people who weren't being told they needed to shape up or ship out were instead simply told they're being shipped out. The only upside is managers got better about supporting employees later on who weren't performing, including putting people on PIPs rather than letting them coast.
But what you cannot do in any circumstance is let people go "for any reason". There are laws against that at any size, and you are looking for a lawsuit if you give a reason.
It's best to just tell them their position has been eliminated due to restructuring (has to be provable if you're a big company), and give them no reason beyond that. If you don't give a reason, they have nothing to bring a lawsuit for.
In summary, reasons are not always required, but are always a liability.
Then there’s the perverse incentive that bigger teams usually equals a promotion. So if you’re the honest manager who manages a tight team and fires people, you won’t get promoted as often.
Top management knows this, of course. To sidestep these misaligned incentives a company-wide one-time layoff is really effective.
You can definitely argue it's not fair to pay somebody extra for not doing a job but the alternative seems to be you keep paying them even more to keep not doing a job (and possibly doing negative work).
Rather than put somebody on a pip for x months just offer them x months of salary to quit. Same money, same work done.
There's a legal distinction which impacts whether or not the employee is eligible for unemployment benefits, among other things.
(although legally "firing" vs "layoff" is irrelevant, depending on the situation you can get benefits despite being what a layperson considered quitting [1]).
[1]: https://www.darwingray.com/from-desk-to-departure-when-movin...
The company could be sued by a non employee too. What difference does that make?
And if your company procedure requires a PIP, then you do that. Again, where's the difficulty?
Nothing you've said sounds difficult in the slightest. It's following procedure.
It’s difficult to stop lying sometimes