IMHO having everyone call in to listen to a pre-recorded message telling them they're fired is just as bad as the public firing Armstrong gave. At least have the decency to have a face to face conversation or meeting.
On May 14, 2007, the staff of Sigil Games Online were told to meet in the parking lot at 4:30PM and to take with them what they would need for the rest of the day. The employees were told that the launch of the game had not gone well, the company was in financial trouble and they were selling the company to Sony Online Entertainment. Director of Production, Andy Platter, then told the employees "You're all fired."
A production studio I was with had to shut down due to some contracts falling through, and everybody went to the liquor store, got a bunch of beer, sat outside (this was in the Summer) and had an afternoon drinking and reminiscing. We all just chatted from 10am till late into the evening.
It was sad but also one of my fondest memories, one of those that makes you tear up and smile.
I'd see it as you're with a bunch of people, some even friends now all applying for the same remaining jobs
Another thing is that all the poker and casino companies often share office buildings in small non-regulated countries like Malta and Gibraltar. So the same happens to all the other companies which means the streets outside are filled with people from a dozen of companies who have just been fired.
I think two thirds of the whole building or something like that was relieved on the same day the last time it happened.
I think people overthink this, and I think I overthought it when I just did it this week. The fact is that when you fire people, most of them are going to be upset, and they'll find something to rationalize that emotion no matter what you do. If you have a face-to-face, they'll say "Can you believe he was mocking us by wearing his ball cap, or his old tennis shoes, or those jeans he wore the same day he hired all of us, or that polo with the company logo on it like the company hasn't already been besmirched? How disrespectful!" or they'll just completely fabricate something like "Wow, he was so aloof in that meeting, what a mean guy".
What it really comes down to is that most people are going to look for "facts" that support their emotional perspective, not emotions that are congruent with the factual perspective.
The pre-recorded call firings are done that way to make sure the phrasing is perfect. Most likely the lawyer has already written the script and they do several takes to perfect the firing executive's inflection, tone, etc. I don't think this is objectively worse than firing someone in person or via e-mail either.
For the record, the employee I fired stated that the firing was "classless and vile" despite the inclusion of a generous and completely optional severance package, an immaculately respectful email that politely informed her the position was being eliminated and stated that we hoped we'd work together in the future, and so forth. It was honestly one of the classiest firings in which I've been involved, but like I said, to the fired person, there's always a grudge to find if they want to find one, and she wanted to find one. Her grudge is that I didn't "give the customary notice period" for a firing, which afaik absolutely doesn't exist anywhere except in the few cases that fall under the WARN act (under which companies are entitled to pay a severance equal to the legally-mandated notice period in lieu of notice).
Firing via email or pre-recorded message is a way to avoid looking your failure of responsibility in the eye
I also understand that your platitude on firing is transparent propaganda, but that's neither here nor there to this discussion -- whoever did or didn't do things that precipitated or mandated the firing, the fact is that it must happen, and that not everyone reacts the same way or prefers the same style.
I should note I also state this from the perspective of one who has been fired (in all occurrences, I'm using "fired" as a catch-all for all instances where a job is involuntarily terminated; this can mean the contract ends, the company or unit is closing, or performance was unsatisfactory to the bosses). I think I would've preferred to be fired remotely in all instances except one (where I wasn't really fired, but my already-turned-in two weeks notice was prematurely ended). I wouldn't think the bosses were "cowards" for depriving me of the opportunity to personally and physically guilt them, but like I said, to each his own.
The takeaway here is that the people doing the firing shouldn't concern themselves too abundantly about whether the employee is going to appreciate the atmosphere of the firing or not, because news flash: they won't.
> whoever did or didn't do things that precipitated or mandated the firing, the fact is that it must happen
Oh, but you can't call that a fact, because it fails the verifiability test. I mean, firing is a decision made by management, the same management that placed the company in this position in the first place. And it amuses me that in big corporations, management almost never gets fired.
> not everyone reacts the same way or prefers the same style
This is not subjective, as having the common decency to look a person in the eyes before stabbing is something one should learn at home in order to pass for a human.
Truth be told, I would get pretty mad about such things, but fortunately such companies are usually ran by incompetents and so most of them either go out of business or become completely irrelevant and for me that's justice enough.
You must have had a very interesting childhood.
"A true friend stabs you in the front."
There is no argument. There is only the dogmatic belief that there is some cosmic moral code that states persons must be fired in person. As I've said probably four times now, I accept whole-heartedly there are times when that is the best course of action, and I've acted accordingly and fired these people face-to-face. But I don't believe there is a cosmic moral law violated by considering or performing the firing via alternate, asynchronous means. I believe that circumstances can make this a better option sometimes.
>Oh, but you can't call that a fact, because it fails the verifiability test. I mean, firing is a decision made by management, the same management that placed the company in this position in the first place.
This is nitpicking at semantics. I understand that firing is usually a subjective judgment call, obviously. I guess better phrasing would've been "whoever did or didn't do things... the decision has been made and needs to be executed".
>Truth be told, I would get pretty mad about such things, but fortunately such companies are usually ran by incompetents and so most of them either go out of business or become completely irrelevant and for me that's justice enough.
As I alluded elsewhere, I think it is silly to state that the C-levels at all of these big companies are "incompetents" because they don't meet with every employee individually to fire them. It's a routine way to do mass layoffs and it's easy for employees to say "That guy couldn't look me in the eye", but it's also easy for employees to find all kinds of other things to complain about. Since your employees are going to be unhappy when they're fired anyway, I believe it should be done in the most objectively logical and considerate way, even if it leaves room for petty complaints about the venue, because people who want to complain are going to find something to complain about even if you fire them in the most stately of palaces and most well-pressed of designer suits, with braces that keep your eyelids open so that there is no doubt that you were willing to "look them in the eye" when you fired them.
Sometimes there is no good alternative; like others are saying in this thread, it's often impossible to concoct a graceful firing experience. Saying that people are incompetent for remote firings is ascribing far too much value to what is ultimately a subjective presentation, and ignoring the serious and real logistical issues sometimes involved with a "look-me-in-the-eye" firing.
As a side note, I don't believe I need to be punished for firing this employee. This didn't enter into my calculation because I don't consider it a punishment to fire someone face-to-face if that's appropriate for the situation.
It's not about punishment. It's not: oh, you did something bad, you need to be punished for it. It's that it shouldn't be easy, and doing it in person makes sure of that. That's all it is. And it sounds a lot like you're rationalizing your desire to avoid that situation by telling yourself that it would be better for the employee, as though you won't let yourself consider the idea that it's all about it being easier for you.
The really impressive part of your comment is how you summarized it perfectly in the middle of it.
I've never been fired, but I've fired other people, and I've always believed it's something you should do when looking someone in the eye. That's the way I'd want it done if I were the one packing my stuff. Every time I did it I think there was more stress for me than the person getting fired, but if I were still managing people I'd still do it that way.
The only time I didn't do it that way was when I worked for this sleazy field services body shop that was worried the managers would say something out of school and get the company sued. They had someone from HR who was trained in firing people (love to put that on my resume) by legal do it. And we were not allowed to comment on anything.
I worked at a place where the first inkling something wasn't right is your badge doesn't open the door any more. You go to security to get a replacement (because you think it's broken), and they have all your stuff in a box by the security desk. See ya. Didn't stay there long, though. I kept expecting someone with a broken badge to off himself before he realized he still had a job. Who wants to work at a place like that?
It's lame because firing, both being fired and doing the firing, is lame. Any way it's done, it's going to be lame. "Look me in the eye when you fire me, see if you can stare me down" is really just machismo bloviation, as far as I can tell. Perhaps some people walk away saying "Well, he had the respect to look me in the eye", but somehow I feel that people that get stuck on this would be more inclined to say "That heartless bastard looked me right in the eye as he fired me."
It's a no-win situation. Is it really better to expose the company and the remaining employees to liability by having that meeting 1000 times in one day, repeating the same boilerplate, just so that a few of your ex-employees may walk away with a slightly-more-hospitable opinion of you? Even if they don't have this to mark against you, assuming they were the type of employee inclined to do so, they're still probably not going to like you, because, well, you fired them.
Not to me. To me it's a question of respect. To do it by email even over the phone sends the message you didn't think he was worth enough, as a person, to waste any time on.
All I'm saying is that it's circumstantial. There are definitely cases where an in-person firing is an important part of showing respect; maybe we'll even say it's the default case. But there are cases where it's more respectful, dependent on circumstances and personalities, to do it in an asynchronous communication channel (taped message, email, etc).
Walk through the logistics of firing 900 people individually, one at a time, looking each in the eye individually each time (and/or having your highest-ranking representative do it at various offices), and you'll notice there are some serious problems with this solution too. Is it better to leave the employee in agony all day, wondering when or if he's going to get called, getting increasingly more angry as his friends drop out one by one while he retains access to internal company systems, etc., just so you can walk around and tell everyone "I looked 'im straight in the eye!" If you think beyond this weird hangup that some people have, you'll see that there is really every reason to do the firing in a more efficient way in these cases. The only thing lost is the good vibes from any recently-fired employees that decide the opportunity to stare down their boss before they get terminated is a critical part of their self-worth, which honestly, probably scarcely existed in the first place.
We should do the best thing for all involved, not the most politically correct thing. It's politically correct to have a final showdown where you stare down the person you're about to fire, but it's not always actually the best option.
That said, I've only had two firings go 'bad' over the years, in one case the person had stolen from the company and it was an 'on the spot' affair, in the other it was someone with a history of instability. But other than that layoffs and firings were dealt with in as calm and constructive a manner as possible, including helping those laid off to find new employment and references specifically tailored to the person.
Being an employer is not always fun, hiring people in a time of growth is great, letting them go when things are bad is terrible, but I always remind myself it is a lot more terrible for the employees than for the employer and shielding myself from their emotions would feel like a terrible cop-out.
In this specific instance, I chose to fire her via email because 90% of our communication was via email, it usually takes weeks to schedule and actually get to an in-person meeting time (since she would cancel meetings probably 70% of the time), and we always meet in public places like coffee shops (her choice, not mine), where any visible emotional shock would be apparent to bystanders. It had much more to do with practicalities and concern for her privacy than any concern about "saving myself" from an adverse reaction (which I still got in a nasty retaliatory email).
Making time for her and selecting an appropriate venue would have been better - in my opinion, not being in your shoes that's an easy one to hold. But I've been in your shoes in other situations and we seem to have a totally different take on this.
As for the nasty retaliatory email: you fired her by email, what did you expect in return, a personal visit?
Is it really nicer to make her walk out of a place where she knows people with mascara running down her face than it is to let her read and handle the news at home, just so I can go around and tell everyone that I wasn't a coward and I "owned up to my mistakes" by making an adult cry in public?
I should note that not everyone cries. Maybe she wouldn't have cried. Maybe she would've jumped up and screamed at me. Maybe she just would've been noticeably sullen. Maybe she would've been completely unphased. I ultimately decided that for her sake, it wasn't the appropriate venue to take that kind of risk, and that the news would be best received via email at a time when I knew she'd be home.
>As for the nasty retaliatory email: you fired her by email, what did you expect in return, a personal visit?
It's not that I didn't expect the email, just that I didn't expect to avoid the "consequences" of my "screw up" by firing her in an asynchronous medium.
It may be a cultural difference or maybe it is for legal reasons but I don't believe in getting people fired 'on the spot' unless they've done something quite terrible and in every other case the fact that we will be parting ways at some point is most likely evident to both parties long before it needs to be formalized. So maybe that's why I don't need to resort to firing people from a safe distance because the writing will have been on the wall for quite a while.
Case in point: when I wound down TrueTech Canada Inc (15 employees at its peak) it was obvious to everybody working there that we were doing bad, even so I found the time to try to get those that had trouble finding other employment at least a temporary fix. I'm still in contact with almost everybody that I employed over the years and that's a point of pride with me. If I'd have sent them an email while keeping them in the dark about the situation until the last moment I doubt that that would have been the case.
I'll also say that for all the politically-correct management platitudes that people like to throw around like "if someone gets fired, it's always the boss that failed" or "your employee should always know what's coming", real life is frequently somewhat more complex. I completely agree with the principles behind these populist quips, but like most things in the real world, there are imperfections -- mitigating factors -- that can make the application of the principles complex. These are generalizations, and they're good generally, but they're not good all the time.
I've also been able to maintain good relationships across employment status changes, fwiw. I've hired back people I've fired before and maintain a good rapport with most employees I've had to dismiss. I'm in an engagement now with someone who I've hired myself, been hired by, quit on, and been fired by (remotely, for a gig he didn't hire me for) and we've been able to remain friends through all of that, so I don't think it's a generalized issue with my conception around employment relationships.
EDIT: Also, even if people know a termination is coming somewhere along the line, it's easy to forget and they often will have an adverse reaction when it actually comes down. I don't think "employee is so naive they think they'll be kept around after X Y and Z" is the only situation where this kind of consideration is appropriate. I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree; we place fundamentally different values on "looking someone in the eye" (maybe because I've done so much telecommute stuff that I don't see this as the MO for "big decision" discussions, at least not with reference to employment). It simply isn't an important independent principle for me, and I try to consider what will make the employee most comfortable, within reason.
That's super-weird, frankly. If you're running a serious business you ought to at least have access to office space for something as important as this, even if it's hiring one for an hour. In the worst case if an in-person meeting takes that long to arrange then something like skype or even a phone call is still a much better fallback than email.
If she doesn't turn up to the meeting where you're firing her then sure, email.
I guess the root of the thing here is that I don't think it's that bad to fire someone over email if that's appropriate for the situation and personality. I didn't give this list as proof that I couldn't've fired her in person if I REALLY wanted to, I gave it to provide just a bit of context around the circumstances that influenced the tradeoff.
Yes, it's possible she'll go around and think about how I'm such a spineless coward because I didn't make her cry in the coffee shop when I fired her, but it's probable she'd go around thinking I was a spineless coward or INSERT_INSULT_HERE even if I met her in person and did it. That's the point. A friend recently fired an employee in person and was informed that he would come back and "rape him [my friend] in the ass". Obviously the setting is not the most important part of the firing; the most important part is that it's happening at all.
At this point it may be worthwhile to indicate that these positions aren't all for well-tempered, highly-compensated hackers or engineers. The worker I fired did not have advanced skills and neither did the worker my friend fired. Some people in these groups are less objective about these involuntary departures than you'd expect in a conventional white-collar setting.
It would've been highly unusual to procure a space that would've been appropriate for this type of meeting and she'd immediately be tipped off that something weird was happening. This could put her in a worse frame of mind; if she enters fancy virtual office and thinks, "Wow, this is a nice place, I wonder if we're going to move here, I bet some really big super cool deals are happening that I'm about to hear about", is that really going to make the situation less volatile?
And again, I'm doing all of this... why, exactly? So she'll have one less checkbox in the "things to hate" list? She can put plenty there if she wants to, "fired me by email" is really immaterial, and again, even though it may look worse to fire via email, I did end up doing it out of concern for her long-term well-being, not mine, since it doesn't really make a big difference to me either way -- it's just an hour or so of my time, for her it's a big life change, and we usually meet at a public place near her home (for her convenience, of course), which is where this would've potentially gone down.
Luckily I moved on to healthier areas before the hammer started falling. That said, I still think about how much of a drag it would be to come in to work only to be fired. Spare me the time and awkward situation, I say.
If I was worried about my image, I would've fired her in person so that I could tell everyone "Oh me, oh my, I would NEVER fire an employee without a full honor guard and 21-gun salute!", and so that she couldn't tell anyone "Oh, that guy didn't even have the balls to fire me in person." I also wouldn't post about this on HN defending the executives of major multinational corporations, known worldwide for their abysmal IQs and inability to perform basic critical reasoning functions.
I'm honestly not seeing how opting not to do this in person can be perceived as "good for image". Can you clarify?
Like I said, I've fired people in person before and I'm not going to shrink from that duty if it's truly the best course of action. But I'm not going to insist on it at the cost of the employee's dignity just so that I can tell everyone "I have never fired someone in a non-sound-bite friendly manner".
The C-level that fired everyone by pre-recorded conference call most likely went through a similar dilemma, and I sympathize with him. I don't think it's an objectively bad way to fire a group of people. Is the alternative, that your peers start getting called into an office and told individually that they're being fired while you sit there in panic with continued access to corporate resources just waiting for your turn, really that much better just because there's some lackey that can stare into your soul and relay the message from corporate HQ? Or could the C-level be seen as a coward for not delivering the message himself and making a lackey take the blame?
I believe people have romanticized this process far too much. I don't believe a staredown is so obviously superior to alternate forms. I understand that you just said it is and that the only reason I didn't do it this time was because I was worried about my image (again, what?), but I don't find that to be a convincing argument. As I said elsewhere, I'd prefer to be fired remotely. A couple of the other guys in this thread have expressed that too. I felt that was the appropriate course in this situation.
It's not easy to be the boss and make these calls. Everyone is going to have an opinion without the information or perspective and there are people that are going to dislike you for the decisions you make, no matter what they are. It's part of the territory. It'd sure help hacker entrepreneurs if we dropped the PC line once in a while and had some real talk.
Stores that were closing did not know until a specific date, when they'd go into work as usual and open a securely delivered packet. If the packet delivered was packet A, it informed them that they were laid off, effective immediately - all employees of that location. Packet B informed them that they were not closing. They had no idea what the case would be until the morning they opened the packet, and the packet was delivered the previous night.
Think about that at 1,000-person-layoff scale. If we apply some basic Little's Law math to the process here, we quickly see how "by-hand" firings would drag on for quite some time, perhaps needlessly prolonging the inevitable, and almost certainly disrupting work at the entire office for days on end.
There is no "good" way to do this. I've never had to do it myself, and I can only hope I never have to. The thought of how "best" to do it would keep me up for weeks. At the very least, I suppose in-person messengers are better than automated voicemail recordings, or sealed envelopes. But even if using a human messenger, a mass layoff is not going to go down well for the people being laid off. There is something to be said for ripping off the band-aid (though perhaps in timed batches, so you're not just dumping N people out into the cold, to fight over the same jobs on the market all at once).
If you're keeping any significant portion of your existing workforce, absolutely. Doing a single round of layoffs and then being able to tell the remaining employees "If we haven't talked to you, you're staying" can make the hit to morale that much smaller. It'll still lower morale, that's unavoidable. But it will take away the stress of "is my job safe?" for the remaining employees.