When Letting People Go Is As Difficult As Getting A Resignation

I often compare quitting a job or letting someone go as breaking up in a love relationship: there are always 2 sides of the story and every party has probably something they can be blamed for.

There are 2 very common urban legends in the professional world:

1. When someone gives a resignation, it’s because the grass must be greener on the other side,
2. When someone is fired, the employee is the victim, the employer is the mean guy.

Well, of course, the purpose here is not to generalize but to give the employer’s perspective which is not always well understood. And this subject mattered to me as:

1. I often take resignation as a failure,
2. I often take dismissals as a failure.

So I thought maybe other employers/managers/directors could feel like me.

What does a departure mean for an employer?

1. You’ll need to communicate it correctly to your team/office/department in order to avoid gossip and misunderstandings about the reasons why a person left,
2. You’ll have to start a whole new recruitment process for hiring someone new,
3. You’ll need to train the new employee from scratch…

It will basically take 3–6 months to completely replace your previous employee or even more depending on the profile.

Resignation

The biggest fear is when a team member asks you to talk to you in private. Each time this happened, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking “let’s hope they are not going to resign”. When people resign, there are 3 main reasons:

• Their personal situation changed: moving to another location, family getting bigger, divorce, disease, etc.
• They get bored in their job,
• They are not performing.

When the personal situation changes, there is not much an employer can do. However, when people get bored in their job or are not performing, isn’t there anything we, as managers, could have done differently to make things change? That’s why exit interviews exist and are so important. It gives the possibility to clearly understand what went wrong and what can be improved but also at the same time, give an open feedback to the future ex-team member.

“We all need to celebrate success, and learn from failure”

Within our company we always try to understand the main reasons for someone’s departure and try to analyze every situation very carefully.

Dismissals

Together with surprise resignations, dismissals remain the most challenging and difficult subject for every manager/director/employer. As explained previously, we always look at 3 things:

1. Attitude,
2. Activities,
3. Performance.

We run quarterly evaluations in order to assess how the person evolves and how we can help further to improve skills. Since we set up our company, and unlike some of our competitors, we have never let someone go because of poor performance. We believe that performance can be fixed with the right attitude and by increasing/improving the targets. But that’s not the case with attitude. That’s why, the reasons we’ve let people go are the following:

• Lack of respect,
• Creating a bad atmosphere within the office,
• Absenteeism.

Employees and employers, should always remember that they both have rights and responsibilities. And the major responsibility of an employee is to adapt to the new work environment and give his best to meet the requirements in terms of attitude. Firing someone is a challenging decision:

1. You usually know the employee’s personal situation and know that the consequences of a dismissal can be harming the person,
2. You, as an employer, always think you might have been able to do something to fix it,
3. You know you will always look like the mean boss who fired the poor guy and are afraid about the consequences of a dismissal on your team/office/department.

The way I decided to deal with departures

First of all, when dealing with resignations, an exit interview often allows me to understand and analyze the situation and/or if I could have done anything differently in order to learn from it.

Secondly, concerning firing someone, I’ve never let anyone go without giving clear oral and/or written warnings. A dismissal should never be a surprise for the employee, everyone deserves a second chance and the opportunity to take it or not. That’s why the reasons of the warnings should always be explained in a very clear, direct and transparent way otherwise the employee might not understand how critical the situation is.

“Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences” —(N. Cousins)

There are always consequences to our actions so if the team member already received one or several warnings and didn’t do anything to improve the situation, that person should understand that an employer can’t keep someone who decided not to change and improve.

I think I’ll always consider someone’s departure as a failure because firing is so emotionally charged for both sides but at least I’ll always try to learn from it and I generally know I made the right decision when I feel I have my team’s support when I announce that we had to let that person go.

Last but not least, I often speak in a very transparent way to my teams to explain how difficult a departure is for the employer. Awareness is also key in this very sensitive subject.