this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
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And does the dead weight get cut during layoff season? Or does it affect people who are capable but won't take bullshit from management?
I've seen both, sometimes middle management gets gutted and things are reorganized, sometimes it's more focused on the grunts.
You can only generalize it so far
I actually think we did a pretty good job - but our “layoff” was a mini one. Fractions of a percent. But of the people I knew, wasn’t worried about any of them. Felt bad for the people, they were all nice, but none of em were good at their jobs.
Quite a few sr directors and VPs were let go, or allowed to leave….
For me it finally did. A long time team member who in the past year probably had negative productivity was let go. Sucks for that person, but a big relief for everybody else.
Now this is Sweden where unions and labor laws are strong, so usually it’s difficult to fire long time employees like that.
I inherited a team when a manager left a nonprofit that I worked at. This was in the Netherlands, and in my earlier management training here we were basically told that the list of valid reasons to fire someone does not include poor performance.
Of the team, like 4 people were pretty good, a couple excellent, and two were basically dead weight. One even worse, because he was a constant source of negativity. I spent ages working on ways to figure out how to help, cajole, and otherwise magically somehow improve these two bad workers ability to contribute to our company.
Eventually in frustration I went to HR, and was like, "look at all this shit I've tried, what else can I do?" The head of HR was like, "Why did you waste so much time. We'll fire them." I was shocked, because I didn't think that was possible! It turns out that there is always a way to fire someone. You have to give them severance pay, but better pay someone to leave than have them ruining morale for everyone.
I talked to one of the people I fired a couple of years later. He thanked me. He was working for Greenpeace at the time, and basically said that he felt trapped at a good paying job, and getting fired gave him motivation. I also ran into the negative guy, and he remains a worthless shit.
Anyway the point is that management should not rely on layoffs to sort out staff issues. Sort out your problems when you have them.
Broadly from what I saw, it was pretty much all the people that didn’t do anything useful.
In fact a lot of them were the guys who didn’t give anyone shit, because they didn’t do shit.