That's odd, I seem to see the incentive to fire people with stock value improving as a result.
And since management is often paid in stock, they seem to care more about stock price than this "years of salary and paperwork" cost you mention.
And since management is often paid in stock, they seem to care more about stock price than this "years of salary and paperwork" cost you mention.
If you are firing someone to replace them with someone else, you are incurring a lot of cost (hiring is time consuming, difficult, risky, and requires a ramp-up time before the new hire is productive), and hoping that the long term benefits outweigh that cost.
In reality layoffs almost always cause the stock to go up. The market seems to think layoffs are an unalloyed good.
If the employees were advantageous, I agree laying them off should be a long term negative as you seem to suggest.
Kinda like cheering the warmth of a burning bed on a cold night.
If they were inefficient/ineffective then management is crappy for not dealing with the problem sooner.
Sure, companies are resilient. But the first year or two of lost competence from layoffs can be quite rough…
You are treating short-term stock market movements as a signal of how well the company is performing.
Now if your line manager fires somebody for no good reason and then has to still pay the salary of this person for a year and a half and also pay the salary of their replacement -- that, when accumulated, starts affecting bottom line at some point.