- Employee was error prone and this mistake was just the biggest one to make headlines. Could be from incompetence or apathy.
- Impacted clients demanded the employee at-fault be terminated.
- Deterrence: fire one guy, everyone else knows to take that issue seriously. Doesn't Google do this? If you leak something to press, you're fired, then a company email goes out "Hey we canned dude for running his mouth..."
It's better to engage the known and perhaps questionable justifications than to "never understand".
Case 1: It's fine to fire individuals for ongoing performance issues. (though you must make clear to those who remain that the number and types issues the individual already had, and the steps that had been taken to help the individual rectify their performance issue.)
Case 2: no competent manager would fire an employee who made a mistake to satisfy clients. They may move the employee to a role away from that client, but it would be insanity to allow the most unreasonable clients to dictate who gets fired. Any manager who does what you suggest should expect to have lost all credibility in the eyes of their team.
Case 3a: A leak to the press is a purposeful action. Firing for cause is perfectly reasonable. Making a mistake is not a purposeful action.
Case 3b: If you want to convey that a particular type of mistake is serious, don't do so by firing people. Do so with investments in education, process, and other tools that reduce the risk of the mistake occurring, and the harm when the mistake occurs. Firing somebody will backfire badly, as many of your best employees will self-select away from your most important projects, and away from your company, as they won't want to be in a situation where years of excellent performance can be erased with a single error.
Case 2: Agreed, but not everyone is lucky enough to work for a competent manager. And managers don't fit neatly within competent and incompetent buckets. Under external or higher pressure ("his job or your job") a normally decent manager might make that call.
Case 3a: Good distinction, a conscious leak is not a mistake. It's possible for a leak to be accidental though, say under alcohol, lost laptop, or just caught off guard by a clever inquisitor.
Case 3b: Firing has the effects you mention, but it also has the effect of assigning gravity to that error. I'm not claiming the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, but some managers do.
I'm not a proponent of the above, but it's good to understand the possible rationale behind these decisions.
Firing someone over making a mistake is never a good idea.
If you're going to have firing offenses, spell those out. E.g. breaking the law, violating some set of rules in the handbook, whatever., so that people can at least know there's a process or sensibility to the actions.
If people can be fired for making a mistake, and that wasn't laid out at the outset, then they're just not gonna trust the stability of your workplace.
Firing for mistakes can make sense in the context of a small company that has to pay enough to rectify the mistake that it significantly impacts the budget. If this cost needs to be recouped, it is only fair that it be recouped from the salary preserved by terminating the responsible party. We're not all megacorps.
This is going to depend on the severity, cost, budget, importance of the role filled, etc., but I think it's probably one of the only semi-plausible justifications for firing based on things that do not reflect a serious and ongoing competency or legal issue.
A mistake is made, and a material loss has been incurred. This sucks. Been there, done that, didn't get the t-shirt because we couldn't afford such a luxury. I watched my annual bonus evaporate because of somebody else's cock-up.
But there's no reason to believe that firing the mistake-maker is the best move. Maybe the right move is to find money somewhere else (cutting a bunch of discretionary, pushing some expenses into the future, reducing some investment), or maybe it's to ask a few people to take pay cuts in return for some deferred comp. Or maybe it's to lay-off somebody who didn't do anything wrong, but who provides less marginal value to the company.
But it'd be one hell of a coincidence if, after an honest to god mistake, the best next action was to fire the person who made the mistake. After all, if they were in a position to screw your company that hard, they almost certainly had a history of being talented, highly valued, and trustworthy. If they weren't good, you wouldn't have put them in a place where failure is so devastating.
>Firing for mistakes can make sense in the context of a small company that has to pay enough to rectify the mistake that it significantly impacts the budget. If this cost needs to be recouped, it is only fair that it be recouped from the salary preserved by terminating the responsible party.
What was the fired person doing? Presumably they were performing required work otherwise the company wouldn't have been paying them in the first place.
That means you know need to pay to replace which costs more than keeping an existing employee. Or you could divide their responsibilities among the remaining employees but if you thought you could do that you would have already laid them off without waiting for them to mess something up.
If you're going to let your clients decide when you fire someone you're having some enormous issues. Take the person off their account, sure, but how in hell does a client make your HR decisions?
> Doesn't Google do this? If you leak something to press, you're fired, then a company email goes out "Hey we canned dude for running his mouth..."
I've never heard of this happening. I've heard of people fired for taking photographs (or stealing prototypes!) of confidential products and handing them to journalists.
- Employee was error prone and this mistake was just the biggest one to make headlines. Could be from incompetence or apathy.
- Impacted clients demanded the employee at-fault be terminated.
- Deterrence: fire one guy, everyone else knows to take that issue seriously. Doesn't Google do this? If you leak something to press, you're fired, then a company email goes out "Hey we canned dude for running his mouth..."
It's better to engage the known and perhaps questionable justifications than to "never understand".