7 ms·

Summary: Cover your ass. Here are the author's ideas, rewritten without the pollyannaish nonsense: Step 1: Have a gigantic book of employee guidelines. At a

Summary: Cover your ass. Here are the author's ideas, rewritten without the pollyannaish nonsense: Step 1: Have a gigantic book of employee guidelines. At any point in time, you should be able to pick an employee and find something you can write them up for. Have the employee sign a piece of paper on day 1 that they are aware of the book. Step 2: Before you fire the employee, make sure you've written him up more than once. Lay your groundwork a week or two in advance. Find something else, and do the paperwork from step one. You don't fire an employee for walking in on the VP banging a secretary, it's because he wasn't filing his TPS reports properly. Step 3: When actually firing somebody, have a witness + a recording device in the room. This protects you from sexual harassment lawsuits. Step 4: Explanations: Blame the economy. If that doesn't work, blame the phases of the moon. Anything you want, but not something that is grounds for a wrongful termination suit.

ph0rque 14y ago
Nice summary of what my reaction was after reading this post. I especially like the parts of the excerpt that basically said, "we may fire you for any of these things, or something else entirely".
- GoodIntentions 14y ago
  >> or something else entirely "making eye contact with your betters" "choosing the wrong religion" "whatever else I feel like, but can't write down without getting sued?"
TylerE 14y ago
For extra credit, compare and contrast this approach to the US justice system.
thetrb 14y ago
I also especially liked this: Part of the Employee Handbook: "Reasons for termination include but are not limited to the following: [...] • Other reasons not listed here" And then his comment: "As you can see, these are clear boundaries" Yeah, very clear boundaries there: You can be fired for anything, including "reasons not listed here".
- vacri 14y ago
  It is actually a pretty clear list. It's listing a number of things clearly. It's also saying that the list is not closed, because anything can happen and you can't predict everything. What if an employee decides to splash paint on all the cars in the car park? Unlikely, but possible, and it's stupid to try and come up with every such possibility, because you'll never hit them all. The list hits the most common issues and lays them out clearly.
  - phillmv 14y ago
    It's easy. My employee handbook, should I ever get to that stage, shall read: 1) Be honest. 2) Don't be a dipshit. 3) If you have a problem with something, ask.
    - vacri 14y ago
      As your number of staff increases, you'll find that you need to be more explicit. Real world people are complex creatures, and managing them isn't simple. What defines 'being a dipshit', for example? For some, it's being a pedant. For others, it's being slow to learn. Others think it's about obnoxiousness. Besides, rules like "fraudulent timesheets are a fireable offense" make it explicitly clear that 'we check these things', and avoid the 'but I didn't know it was wrong' excuses that you will hear with enough employees, commonsense be damned.
      - phillmv 14y ago
        True but such is life. You make up for it by always giving people a chance first. You never fire on the first sign of dipshittiness.
- cheatercheater 14y ago
  Came here to post that. In addition, the dickhead reserves the right to change the rules at any time, and you're required to sign everything. So basically, once you have a job and a contract, you're signing a second contract, when you've been lured into their honey pot. At this moment you end up at a dead end, because you have probably told your other jobs you won't accept. Yeah, nicely played.
gaius 14y ago
It is quite insidious. Consider: We told the veterans to help the new people whenever they could, but none of the old heads really wanted to be bothered But that contravenes: Employees will try to increase productivity in operations whenever possible. He's got them all over a barrel.
- TylerE 14y ago
  It's Catch-22! If they don't help, they're not trying to increase productivity. If they DO help, their OWN productivity will suffer, and if they are truly in, say, the 10%, they are probably more productive than a newbie will ever be.
- run4yourlives 14y ago
  To be fair, he fully sees the error of the former situation and takes blame for that personally. I don't think he was trying to do this on purpose.
  - MaxGabriel 14y ago
    He takes the blame, but he also realizes the cause of the problem and does nothing: "particularly given that we keep track of everyone’s output and any time spent teaching new people would reduce the build total of the teacher."
    - notJim 14y ago
      Yeah, that really stood out to me. He claimed to want to train the new people, but also said he couldn't afford the loss in productivity. You can't have it both ways.
- umjames 14y ago
  The problem is that the boss needs a way to tell if that help is falling on deaf ears. If the help isn't having a sufficiently positive effect, then you have someone who is not qualified to do the work. Is the boss really interested in making his team stronger all-around (not just a few star employees), or does he just not want to have to deal with answering questions from new hires who might be struggling? I'm in this position right now. I'm not being conceited, but I am in the role of the highly-productive employee. My boss hires people (or we acquire new team members as the result of a company organizational change). Either way, before the new team members start, my boss inevitably asks me to make sure they can do the job. I've never seen anyone in my department fired due to incompetence. Whenever a team member has questions/problems, they almost always end up getting sent to me. It has gotten to the point where I now have to head a weekly developer meeting that is really just a glorified question and answer session. The problem is that my team members are never weaned off of my help. My boss doesn't seem to care about this. I've overheard him say to people, who were trying to figure things out without having to ask me for help, to just ask me. I understand that it's more important to my boss to just get things done, but that creates an unnecessary dependency on me. I'm not scalable. Hire better employees or take a hands-on approach to training, but don't keep sending them to me all the time. I can understand why the author's top employees didn't want be bothered with helping those who were struggling. You don't want to be in a position where you have to do your job plus some/most/all of someone else's.
laughinghan 14y ago
I'm not sure what you're saying. All of his ideas, even "rewritten without pollyannaish nonsense", seem to me like essential components of firing someone the right way. Could you contrast these steps with how you believe people should be fired? Summary: Cover your ass. Certainly doing the right thing is one way to cover your ass. Step 1: Have a gigantic book of employee guidelines. At any point in time, you should be able to pick an employee and find something you can write them up for. Have the employee sign a piece of paper on day 1 that they are aware of the book. Are you saying it's better not to have clear employee guidelines or not to make sure they know them? Step 2: Before you fire the employee, make sure you've written him up more than once. Lay your groundwork a week or two in advance. Find something else, and do the paperwork from step one. You don't fire an employee for walking in on the VP banging a secretary, it's because he wasn't filing his TPS reports properly. Are you saying it's better not to wait for repeat offenses, or better not to have clear reasons for firing? I have no idea where you got this "VP banging a secretary" interpretation. He's talking about his furniture company of 6 carpenters, for goodness sake. Step 3: When actually firing somebody, have a witness + a recording device in the room. This protects you from sexual harassment lawsuits. It only protects you from sexual harassment lawsuits if you don't sexually harass them. It also only protects you from any other kind of lawsuit for wrongful behavior if you don't behave wrongfully. Isn't it a good thing for them to not sexually harass employees? Step 4: Explanations: Blame the economy. If that doesn't work, blame the phases of the moon. Anything you want, but not something that is grounds for a wrongful termination suit. Is it better to have no reason, or not to explain to the employee that there were external factors in the decision, or to lie that there were no external factors? Or are you saying external factors never dominate and blaming them is always lying? Of course you shouldn't fire some one for reasons that would be grounds for a wrongful termination suit. Because those would be wrongful terminations! You seem to be narrowly interpreting his attempts to do the right thing as just attempting to cover his ass. I don't see where you got this, he repeatedly agonizes over doing firing the right way. Could you explain what you think he'd do differently if he were actually a good boss, as opposed to just trying to cover his ass?

ph0rque 14y ago

Nice summary of what my reaction was after reading this post. I especially like the parts of the excerpt that basically said, "we may fire you for any of these things, or something else entirely".

GoodIntentions 14y ago
>> or something else entirely "making eye contact with your betters" "choosing the wrong religion" "whatever else I feel like, but can't write down without getting sued?"

TylerE 14y ago

For extra credit, compare and contrast this approach to the US justice system.

thetrb 14y ago

I also especially liked this: Part of the Employee Handbook: "Reasons for termination include but are not limited to the following: [...] • Other reasons not listed here" And then his comment: "As you can see, these are clear boundaries" Yeah, very clear boundaries there: You can be fired for anything, including "reasons not listed here".

vacri 14y ago
It is actually a pretty clear list. It's listing a number of things clearly. It's also saying that the list is not closed, because anything can happen and you can't predict everything. What if an employee decides to splash paint on all the cars in the car park? Unlikely, but possible, and it's stupid to try and come up with every such possibility, because you'll never hit them all. The list hits the most common issues and lays them out clearly.
- phillmv 14y ago
  It's easy. My employee handbook, should I ever get to that stage, shall read: 1) Be honest. 2) Don't be a dipshit. 3) If you have a problem with something, ask.
  - vacri 14y ago
    As your number of staff increases, you'll find that you need to be more explicit. Real world people are complex creatures, and managing them isn't simple. What defines 'being a dipshit', for example? For some, it's being a pedant. For others, it's being slow to learn. Others think it's about obnoxiousness. Besides, rules like "fraudulent timesheets are a fireable offense" make it explicitly clear that 'we check these things', and avoid the 'but I didn't know it was wrong' excuses that you will hear with enough employees, commonsense be damned.
    - phillmv 14y ago
      True but such is life. You make up for it by always giving people a chance first. You never fire on the first sign of dipshittiness.
cheatercheater 14y ago
Came here to post that. In addition, the dickhead reserves the right to change the rules at any time, and you're required to sign everything. So basically, once you have a job and a contract, you're signing a second contract, when you've been lured into their honey pot. At this moment you end up at a dead end, because you have probably told your other jobs you won't accept. Yeah, nicely played.

gaius 14y ago

It is quite insidious. Consider: We told the veterans to help the new people whenever they could, but none of the old heads really wanted to be bothered But that contravenes: Employees will try to increase productivity in operations whenever possible. He's got them all over a barrel.

TylerE 14y ago
It's Catch-22! If they don't help, they're not trying to increase productivity. If they DO help, their OWN productivity will suffer, and if they are truly in, say, the 10%, they are probably more productive than a newbie will ever be.
run4yourlives 14y ago
To be fair, he fully sees the error of the former situation and takes blame for that personally. I don't think he was trying to do this on purpose.
- MaxGabriel 14y ago
  He takes the blame, but he also realizes the cause of the problem and does nothing: "particularly given that we keep track of everyone’s output and any time spent teaching new people would reduce the build total of the teacher."
  - notJim 14y ago
    Yeah, that really stood out to me. He claimed to want to train the new people, but also said he couldn't afford the loss in productivity. You can't have it both ways.
umjames 14y ago
The problem is that the boss needs a way to tell if that help is falling on deaf ears. If the help isn't having a sufficiently positive effect, then you have someone who is not qualified to do the work. Is the boss really interested in making his team stronger all-around (not just a few star employees), or does he just not want to have to deal with answering questions from new hires who might be struggling? I'm in this position right now. I'm not being conceited, but I am in the role of the highly-productive employee. My boss hires people (or we acquire new team members as the result of a company organizational change). Either way, before the new team members start, my boss inevitably asks me to make sure they can do the job. I've never seen anyone in my department fired due to incompetence. Whenever a team member has questions/problems, they almost always end up getting sent to me. It has gotten to the point where I now have to head a weekly developer meeting that is really just a glorified question and answer session. The problem is that my team members are never weaned off of my help. My boss doesn't seem to care about this. I've overheard him say to people, who were trying to figure things out without having to ask me for help, to just ask me. I understand that it's more important to my boss to just get things done, but that creates an unnecessary dependency on me. I'm not scalable. Hire better employees or take a hands-on approach to training, but don't keep sending them to me all the time. I can understand why the author's top employees didn't want be bothered with helping those who were struggling. You don't want to be in a position where you have to do your job plus some/most/all of someone else's.

laughinghan 14y ago

I'm not sure what you're saying. All of his ideas, even "rewritten without pollyannaish nonsense", seem to me like essential components of firing someone the right way. Could you contrast these steps with how you believe people should be fired? Summary: Cover your ass. Certainly doing the right thing is one way to cover your ass. Step 1: Have a gigantic book of employee guidelines. At any point in time, you should be able to pick an employee and find something you can write them up for. Have the employee sign a piece of paper on day 1 that they are aware of the book. Are you saying it's better not to have clear employee guidelines or not to make sure they know them? Step 2: Before you fire the employee, make sure you've written him up more than once. Lay your groundwork a week or two in advance. Find something else, and do the paperwork from step one. You don't fire an employee for walking in on the VP banging a secretary, it's because he wasn't filing his TPS reports properly. Are you saying it's better not to wait for repeat offenses, or better not to have clear reasons for firing? I have no idea where you got this "VP banging a secretary" interpretation. He's talking about his furniture company of 6 carpenters, for goodness sake. Step 3: When actually firing somebody, have a witness + a recording device in the room. This protects you from sexual harassment lawsuits. It only protects you from sexual harassment lawsuits if you don't sexually harass them. It also only protects you from any other kind of lawsuit for wrongful behavior if you don't behave wrongfully. Isn't it a good thing for them to not sexually harass employees? Step 4: Explanations: Blame the economy. If that doesn't work, blame the phases of the moon. Anything you want, but not something that is grounds for a wrongful termination suit. Is it better to have no reason, or not to explain to the employee that there were external factors in the decision, or to lie that there were no external factors? Or are you saying external factors never dominate and blaming them is always lying? Of course you shouldn't fire some one for reasons that would be grounds for a wrongful termination suit. Because those would be wrongful terminations! You seem to be narrowly interpreting his attempts to do the right thing as just attempting to cover his ass. I don't see where you got this, he repeatedly agonizes over doing firing the right way. Could you explain what you think he'd do differently if he were actually a good boss, as opposed to just trying to cover his ass?