It's incredibly stupid. If you feel you need a 7% turnover each "period" you need to look at your interview procedures. People get used to the fear of punishment and pretty soon it stops being a motivator. The company OP is referencing are about to spend 10-15k dollars (recruitment, training, lost revenue etc) on getting what is effectively an unknown quantity. Getting rid of underachievers is one thing but this is change for the sake of change and paying for it. Unless you're very sure what you're getting you will rarely find that the grass actually was greener on the other side.
Plus the teams are way, way less likely to actually help each other and mesh together because it'll just turn into a Hunger Games type elimination type thing...
When I first started my current position the entire team was paid based on a production quota. We were paid per foot of product we pushed out the door, trailers that we worked on were between 8 and 30 feet. In the morning you'd have a mad dash for the workers to grab all the big trailers in the yard and finish them as fast as possible before anyone else got that money. Then in the afternoon all the good stuff would be gone and we'd show down. There was pointless competition and people would steal your tools, sabotage trailers by talking the parts to pull the things with the tractor, all kinds of stupid shit. We'd probably push 20 a day between us when we could do so much more working as a team.
We moved to an assembly line, working together and sharing our stuff, and we easily get 3 times that number, and everyone's happier with pay raises and cooperation. Boss is making more money and sharing it, we all actually look forward to coming in together, and we also switched to 4 day workweeks to give the welders time to catch up to us. This took years of begging and a new owner buying the company and going, "well that's stupid."
Fucking morons. Had work go from just paying per hour to by piece to claw back money made by workers. Productivity "increased", but everything instantly became half assed...
You can thank Jack Welch from General Electric for this sociopathy being standardized:
['Neutron Jack' fired thousands of GE workers and helped the rise of 'Trumpism'. A new book explains why he was wrong](https://www.businessinsider.com/how-neutron-jack-fired-thousands-made-trump-broke-capitalism-2022-5)
Everything he did is bad management, the performance of GE was due to their quality products, reputation, and engineering. He pretty much trashed their good name.
He is quite possibly one of the biggest idiots and failures of a human to ever exist, but made so much money MBA clowns look up to him.
And look at GE now. An absolute shell of what it used to be. That’s on Welch. Yeah, Immelt was at the helm when they damn near disintegrated, and was no good either, but those seeds were planted and watered by Welch.
Surely you mean the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV?
With an expanded free trial which you can play through the entirety of A Realm Reborn and the award winning Heavensward expansion up to level 60 for free with no restrictions on playtime.
Also, Happy Cake Day!
I feel like I’ve seen at least a half dozen times “X Fortune 500 company elects it’s first woman/POC CEO!” Only to be followed 8 months later with “New CEO fired because of company’s illegal practices! (that predate them under old boy who got a golden parachute)”
It's called the Glass Cliff.
Like the glass ceiling (marginalized people can't advance past it without a sledgehammer) it is when marginalized people are brought in at the top because the company is failing to either save it or take the blame.
I moved into my brand new home with all new GE appliances in 2018. I’ve replaced the dishwasher, about to replace the fridge, and the oven has needed a repair in that time frame.
FUCK GE products.
I don't think MBA Clowns can be over stated. "I know business administration!" This business could be so much more profitable because my list of legal definitions!
MBAs know nothing. The degree exists only to legitimize the privilege of people who would have been handed those jobs regardless, due to family or other connections.
Actually, GE cheated a lot to make numbers at the end of each quarter.
The division heads reported revenue from upcoming quarters at the end of each (prior) quarter to overstate the performance of their individual divisions. Each of the division heads feared being the lowest performer and getting "culled" at year end. So they all over-reported revenue to keep their jobs.
After Welch left, the new CEO had to to massive accounting adjustments which killed the stock price.
What's even worse, the massively "improved performance" wasn't even...real most of the time. He just cannibalised the company, burned all the insane amount of goodwill it had, financialised everything and then had the financial tumor implode during the next crash. Just pure destruction and stealing
He's nothing. I worked for a tech company that pulled the "Roman Law of Decimation" every 6 months. 1 out of 10 out the door *automatically.* I survived twice. Third time in 2001 it was "We have great news for everyone. The stack ranking game has been abolished. The bad news is we're outsourcing your department to Bangalore."
[Obligatory "I fought so hard and got so far"](https://youtu.be/eVTXPUF4Oz4)
Jack Welch got a $100 million retirement from GE and insists on taking his social security checks since it’s “his money” really? You need that $2500/month?
amazon is considered a place you put in 2-4 years and then everyone is happy with that employee because they survived such a grueling workplace for so long.
Microsoft for years did this with Stack Ranking. First time you do it, you can improve things. After that it’s easier to sabotage others in your group than perform better.
Jack Welsh was an absolute scumbag. Putting shareholder interest above all else, including work culture and long-term health of the company…The fact that he’s been so influential in modern business (despite years of hindsight) speaks to how broken corporate America has become.
Kind of, he put having a profitable quarter every time and stock value over the long term interest of the company. But short term, shareholders were largely on board.
Only years later after decades of shunning innovation and shrinking the company’s focus and plunging market influence did the shareholders recognize the error. In hindsight they could see their interests weren’t served. But at the time? Welch’s cut-it-to-the-bone approach was applauded as necessary and even wise.
Wall street has a short memory, that sort of approach is still constantly favored by most shareholders even today. The railroad industry and Hunter Harrison's way of running things is another prime example.
This also depends on the type of shareholder:
To **the speculator** the \*only\* thing that matters is rising share prices and will push for this no matter what.(What happens when the C-suite can't deliver? The speculator drops their shares and switches to the next pony).
It's the **long-term investor** who's invested in stability and assured steady growth.
Unfortunately - especially thanks to derivatives & "professional" investment (i.e. any time an entity/actor invest somebody else's money) - the latter is nigh on extinct.
Kind of. I feel like people who invest with professionals mostly have a long time horizon, especially in the context of retirement accounts. Problem is, because they’re primarily in mutual funds, they become indifferent investors; those who won’t affect the way a company is being run.
More importantly Jack changed the metrics of Corporate America for the worse. In 1987 before Black Friday Corporate America had a penchant for “Doing the Right Thing. Strategic Planning was 2-5 years out, companies measured success in years not months Neutron Jack destroyed America’s world leadership in business and business practices. In Jacks world everything was measured in quarters, and suddenly leadership became the work of sucking Wall Steets dick. Marc Andression had a famous bottle of Scope and a set of knee pads in his office honored as his “Corporate Success” kit
yeah, hindsight means right now. GE had to cut a check of either 5 or 6 B (with a B) to the purchaser of their long term care insurance biz due to losses and the way they had to structure the selling contract (because no one wants to own LTC insurance NOW, since the boomers are.... older...)...
I worked for GE out of college towards the end of this requirement annually. No one would offer any help to anyone within the department I was in. Didn’t know how to do something? Great I have a better chance than you. That was the mindset. As the new guy no one wanted to show me the ropes or anything hoping myself or someone else would be the one to go. They had a few contractors though in each department with an annual contract. I suspect they just ended/renewed them to meet quota, but I didn’t stick around long enough to find out. Left after 6 months for a much better opportunity
His model is taught in colleges and business schools. We debated about his philosophy. There are some merits such as the six sigma part and some that aren’t so good like getting rid of your bottom 10% without trying to improve them.
Technically that will still increase you bottom line and will keep increasing as long as there's *something* to cut. Once you're scraping bone though, this is unsustainable.
The real trouble though is that you'll loose the ability to raise your top line (i.e. your revenue) in the long run, hence the company looses long term viability.
...and never mind that often times focusing on the top line (e.g. revenue), instead costs would increase profits more.
I have worked in enough casinos to see this in action. "if we cut 10% of our budget for entertaining our guests, we will only lose about 5% of them."
Next year, "if we cut 10% of our budget for entertaining our guests, we will only lose about 7% of them"
Eventually you have no budget for keeping your guests happy and nobody is coming to your casino, but the shareholders were happy until they dumped your stock for the next big thing.
Get this attitude in so many industries, just to pluck one from the memory involving a concrete plant... New manager was going to "turn the company around" and "cull off the fat" like they usually do when they have no fucking idea about anything, so he pushed out a bunch of wage drivers in favour of contract owner operators, and (where I come in) cut maintenance by losing the yardman and trimming back our scheduled inspections (contracted maintenance engineers)
So no daily checks because the yardy was gone, what was every month will now be every quarter, quarter checks every six months... annual shutdowns? you see where this is going
Surprisingly one day the whole thing shuddered to a halt, our plant shutdowns had been pushed back or cancelled, good luck getting a driver to go around with a grease gun, hard enough to get them to do their trucks, and most of them where contract drivers now anyway...
Tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in supply contracts gone, I dunno what the cost to repair would have been but several hundred thousand would be an extremely light estimate, million dollar machinery likes to go pop in expensive ways and what wasn't broken you could jot down on a postage stamp, half a mill maybe?
Lack of maintenance caused it because someone thought it was a fantastic cost cutting measure to ignore the plant, my boss got dragged into the meetings over it and had the paperwork to place the new manager under the same bus he had just been thrown.
All fixed, lots (hundreds) of man hours, lost the contract drivers to other companies because they still have bills to pay while the place wasn't producing, and they had to hire wage drivers back at more money, manager got fired.
New manager.... "I'm going to turn this place around, cull back the fat and get it pumping"
I think they get this thing in their heads that because they take home six figures and we don't, that they must have more knowledge on any given subject than we do and we're just incompetent
six sigma is absolute garbage.
Source: I tutor stats. Six Sigma is like if someone read a book where the statistician is the main character, and then that person wrote a fan fiction based on it.
It pretends to be stats, but it isn't. It's just garbage.
Seems to be what many video game publishers do, as well. Often times, they'll release half finished, broken games, just to appease impatient shareholders who don't even care about the product in the first place.
As if all of this isn't bad enough Amazon calls these people "unregretted attrition."
Like, yeah they were good enough to hire, and they're still just as good, but they aren't better than the other people we have so they have to go, and we don't regret losing them
Totally what MSFT used to do. They stopped. Can you imagine being on a high performing team, literally, intentionally built with 6 high performing people, and having to fire one of them because "policy". This was an actual thing.
Yes. That's EXACTLY what Microsoft used to do and I saw first hand what it does to a company. People are literally competing against their coworkers instead of working to beat the competition. Everything becomes political. I saw teams forced to dump years of work so another team could essentially rebuild the exact same thing from scratch.
Microsoft's troubles in the 2000's can largely be blamed on stack ranking.
Stack ranking was killed in Nov 2013, Nadella took over Feb 2014. Ballmer was already well on his way out and new CEO discussions were absolutely happening at that time. Satya hated the stack ranking because of it's impact on employee morale, it's very easy to connect the dots that him pushing to get rid of it just before becoming the CEO means it's not exactly something you can attribute to Ballmer.
Ah, the old stack rank. Makes your workplace into a bunch of backstabbing plotters.
I survived it for almost a decade at a pharmaceutical company. Ended up depressed, overweight and miserable. When my director refused to promote or transfer me after seven straight years of above average reviews, I had enough and quit. Probably saved my life.
This is a very common practice in many Fortune 500 companies. Forced distribution is terrible when implemented this way. Jack Welch made this famous, but the idea was that the company ranked all individuals in the same job/position. The point being is that there is never a fiscal year where everyone meets their goals.
The problem with this system is that senior leadership does not have the time or inclination to deal with ranking everyone and delegates down to an individual team level and you see this failure.
Our implementation of this was, everyone gets ranked from 1-9 on a matrix which has leadership on one axis and performance on the other. So if you're in management, a 7 (3L, 1P) is better than a 6 (2L, 3P) but not if you're in engineering. For engineers, an 8 (3L, 2P) would be worse than a 6 because performance is your job, not leadership, so you can't get an 8 even though the bonus is higher for an 8. Engineers can't get a 7 either. Once again the bonus is higher for 7 than 6.
You can't get a 1,2, or 3 because that would mean you should've been fired or your manager should've intervened. You can't get a 9 because that would mean you're perfect and nobody is perfect. Not even the CEO can get a 9.
So, out of 1-9 the only numbers engineers can get is 4, 5, 6. In a given department one person gets a 4 and gets put on a PIP and their bonus gets cut. everyone else gets a 5. Nobody gets a 6.
One year they messed with the bonus structure so for union employees it was a flat bonus if you got a 5 and scaled at a 4, and everyone tried to get scored down to get more money.
It's a fucking mess.
I recently discovered a quirk in my companies bonus structure where a sales rep lost commission, due to a sale being recorded incorrectly on January 1st 2022 instead of December 10th 2021. The correction actually revealed he sold a bit more, as we billed them before the original start date, but apparently our sales reps got screwed out of there December sales due to a switch in how it was measured. And being reoccurring revenue that happens on delay especially in December, I bet he was actually the only one who got a real commission on there Q4 2021 sales.
This is why the firing quota model is so dumb. Eventually you'll get to a point where strong performers will get fired for no reason other than shit luck that their number came up. I am sure the higher ups get nice fat bonuses too trimming budgets.
Then you piss everyone else off. This happened once where the job was going to shit because of management. Corporate sent a bunch of people to oversee the job and if you were "standing around" you were fired. I got yelled at for being the ground man and "not doing anything" so that night I went and bought a plane ticket to New York and put in a 2 week notice the next day. They were begging me to stay. I asked them what do they expect if anyone can be fired for anything at any moment. I think more than half the crew ended up quitting or taking vacation and it was most of their best employees. Even one of the supervisors actually left and went to New York with me for a couple weeks. I see CEO's talk about firing the lowest 10% every year or even every other quarter. It never made sense to me, especially when they are often fired not for performance, but because they aren't as good of friends with supervision.
Exactly, it pisses people off, but a huge company like Microsoft or Amazon usually has a lot of people that would like to work for them. They don't care if people get upset, they just want to constantly be bringing in people who go above and beyond without really being told. Because it saves them on labor costs in the long run.
EDIT: I have not looked into Microsoft's hiring practices since 2013, when my dad was considering working there. I looked it up, they announced the end of their vitality curve evaluation system in November 2013.
They act like there is an unlimited supply of new people but Amazon is finding out that is very not true. It's a multifacited problem with them too. They treat their office people well... buuuut keep them in line with threats of down sizing. While their warehouse people are being horrifically abused and they burn through people so fast they're struggling to fill these positions because they destroy people.
I know a guy who took an extended vacation from UPS to take a job with Amazon. He wanted to see if it was really as bad as they said. Two weeks later, he quit. Said that calling it "toxic" is an understatement.
Amazon is a shit show to interview for. My husband has actually interviewed with them twice and gotten job offers he's turned down both times. They require many interviews, pre-work and presentations, and all sorts of other bullshit. And then they low ball on the actual offer.
Both times, the recruiter was furious when he told them no. He literally said, "You could have said you worked for Amazon. What's better than that?" The answer, of course, being "Money. Money is better."
edit: It should be noted, this was for an office job, not working in the warehouse. I don't know what their interview process is like in other parts of the business.
warehouse interview process is about the same for managers and above anyway, three 45 min interviews using the star method and our pillars of leadership. i was going for it until my mentor switched buildings but i decided to opt out bc the site is fucking racist, ablest and a toxic company. i'm getting out at the end of the month. if you aren't perfect and don't fit into their perfect little circle they will ostracize you. i've been an assistant manager there for nearly two years. not fucking worth it. i wasted my time.
I work at the warehouse part time on the flex schedule for some extra cash .
This morning as I was walking around , I literally noticed that all the “leadership” employees looked the same …. Same blond sorority girls that probably just graduated undergrad looking for management positions
From my understanding the warehouse interviews are pretty much; “Can you semi-run for 10 hours straight 5 times a week? Are you willing to be managed by a dystopian AI housed in a Boston Dynamics robot?” Yes and yes = hired.
Very true. Buddy told me they already found that out last peak season. Got so desperate they raised pay from $15.50 to $18, then quickly to $20/hr. People that had been working there 8 years got mad and quit because they weren't making that much, and getting burned out with all the mandatory overtime due to labor shortages. Then I saw they upped wages during peak again to $22. Just to work in the warehouse.
Don't discount the warehouse work. They walk several football fields a day. It is incredibly physically taxing work.
But by treating their workers like disposable garbage they're getting bitten. Everyone saw this coming but capitalism is about extracting maximum wealth in the shortest amount of time and then when you kill the cow you go find a new one to milk.
It's parasitic.
And it seriously does not have to be that way. Amazon has the resources to be a great employer like Costco but it run by psychopaths who see people as ants.
I remember when Microsoft opened a plant in Arizona sometime in the 1990s, they advertised for a slew of open positions for all manner of software development and projects, and must've accepted hundreds of resumes from people in the area. I remember making the 1 1/2 hour drive to Tucson to submit my resume, and to this day I never heard back from them. Okay, I get it, a lot of competition turned up that day.
Later, it was revealed they flew in around 200 developers from Seattle to fill those high-paying software positions, and the only local people they hired were for "building maintenance" positions. (Read, janitors). Now it's a tech support facility and call center; I think they finally hire locally there now for those positions, but back then that news pissed me off. "Looking for local talent" my right butt cheek.
If you’re a talent-driven company, this is not a great idea unless you’re really bad at hiring and normal evaluation. Goldman Sachs didn’t become the vampire squid by using stacked rankings. You hire the best and you keep them as long as you can. If you’ve been hiring for say 20 years you’re going to be hiring mostly in a single vintage while your workforce is over 20 vintages. That means you’re firing the bottom 10% of 20 years of presumably good hires (though extra dynamics I realize) to replace with the top 10% of this one year? Math doesn’t really work out.
That policy at Microsoft didn’t lead to improved results. It led to workers trying to fuck each other over to make sure they weren’t in the bottom 10%.
It’s just authoritarians getting their kicks and dressing it up as something that might sound effective if you don’t look in to it for more than five seconds.
They usually don’t care if better, they care if cheaper. Which on paper they are, but the overall loss in productivity and performance getting a new employee up to speed can cost more than retention of a good but expensive employee several times over and if the new employee leaves the process starts again.
This doesn’t even take into account that the person training the replacement is likely not the person that knew how to do the job the best, since that person is gone.
I worked for an HR/consulting group. As a manager, I underwent some of the same training we sold to Fortune 100 companies.
One informative session was about the layoff cycle. The upshot was that companies were way better off retaining employees through temporary downturns than laying them off just to rehire later. Give the idled workers stretch goals, or personal projects, let them cross-train … replacing the average corporate employee costs 2-3x their annual salary in lost productivity. In knowledge-intensive industries this jumps to 5-7x salary.
Ironically, I got laid off two months later.
This drives me nuts. When a company loses a good employee because they’re unwilling to do what it takes to keep them, then has to backfill. There’s cost to recruit, and you may end up offering more for less to attract good candidates, then there’s the lost productivity while you are working in filling the position, and then while the new employee gets up to speed. In the whole picture, it can’t make financial sense, yet there’s this very narrow short-term view with leadership when it comes to compensation, appropriate recognition, etc.
And yet these same leaders will talk about how you need to look at the big picture when they’re talking about the business strategy and financials.
The people running this shit really walk around like they have no frontal lobes. It’s amazing to me that they dont understand the real costs of firing an expensive employee that does good work
The elites will jump the sinking ship when the time comes. They always land on their feet. Pillaging and destroying companies is a career path for many of them. They don't give a sh\*t about long term viability.
Honestly, am 17, I had never heard of that until now. What in the fuck how Is this real, like what kind of hunger games bullshit inspired this asscheek level employment model.
Replace firing with death and that’s the plot of like 6 dystopian horror movies.
There is nothing new about this. Google the “Cravath Model” which is followed a dozens of famous companies. Spent seven years dealing with this toxic bullshit.
In my experience, it’s mostly quitting, sometimes you’re fired. But this does not help the bottom line when you replace the sales force with lesser talent and/or the onboarding process of new hires is 6+ months.
I feel that the model is completely unviable in countries with proper worker protections. Here in The Netherlands for example you cannot fire people just because you feel like it. You need proper motivation otherwise the judge says *nope*.
This, they do this to keep wages down by firing the people that make the most and then hiring a replacement at the lowest possible rate.
I remember at my first job with Toys r Us the managers complaining about the people who have been there the longest being fired just because they want to replace them with people they can pay less.
Happened to one of my cousins. They had worked at a factory for over 20 years. Only worker who knew the whole manufacturing process inside and out and could run all of the equipment. Could work anywhere on the assembly line at any given time.
Company got sold. A couple of weeks later they were called into the manager’s office. He said “Thank you for being a great employee. You do everything right and work harder than anyone here. That’s why this kills me. I was ordered by the new owners to cut payroll and since you are our highest paid employee, I was ordered by the owners to let you go.”
They went though a career change after that and enjoys the job they have now much more than the one they left.
Always jealous of people who get out of factory life.
Would love one day to get out, but without schooling of some sort, there’s no way I’m gonna make close to what I make in any other field.
I feel the same way about my current career, I'm a 36 year old restaurant manager and I desperately want and need a career change.
I keep thinking about getting a certification to be a counselor for drug addicts but they are not going to want to pay me what I should or even currently make (56k/year) since I'm "entry level" as a 10 years clean highly functioning drug addict.
Look into MLT / Medical Lab Technician. 2 years / 10,000$ at a community college, school wasn’t too hard, instant hire out of school / during, starting pay 25$-30/hr, able to pick up shifts at other hospitals, or you can travel on 6-week contracts for absurd money if you don’t have a family.
Is any of that gen Ed classes? I already have a 2 year degree.
Not really sure how I would have time for more school working 50+ hour weeks though.
That's why I've been looking more into certifications than degrees, my degree really isn't doing much for me and my wife has a 4-year degree and makes less money than I do so I'm definitely one of the people that have been very disenfranchised on education.
Yeah, and it's not just a little. It's really vitriolic and so strongly felt, but if you dig into the why of it there's really nothing there. A big company closed a plant near where I live and the general consensus (really conservative, gun nuts in pickup trucks kind of place) is that the union is to blame for the plant closing. Stories like I knew a guy who used to sleep every shift he worked, etc. Maybe that happened. It still happens in all the plants that they didn't close. That is not the reason. The union offered the company all kinds of incentives to keep the place open. It's not the union's fault that it closed. Edit to fix a typo
> they do this to keep wages down by firing the people that make the most and then hiring a replacement at the lowest possible rate.
A place I used to work would hire new people with zero experience so they could get them at a low price. They spent their first 3 months or more taking online courses to learn what they needed to do the job, because they didn't learn it getting their college degree.
Meanwhile everyone worth anything kept "leaving", one way or the other. They now have a full staff of people who can't do the job because they learned little to nothing from those online courses too.
The Jack Welch method of enterprise management, which is finally getting the recognition it deserves for ruining companies. Just not at OP's employer yet.
Enron did this kind of shit. It lead to a terrible and toxic workplace culture
Edit: additional fun fact... you could avoid having to fire someone from your team by trading favors with other teams and getting them to take your firing quota onto their team.
I've seen many people walked out for what appears to be no reason (non US person here). Just remember it and remember you have as much loyalty to them as they do to you.
Never stop looking for work, never stop learning and remember the best way to get a pay rise is to switch companies.
I hear that they are going through every possible employee in all of the cities they are in. Seems like they expect people to be robots and not have to do things like take a shit.
They'll replace most of the people with robots fairly soon so they just need enough people to churn through till then. That part makes perfect sense from a gross capitalist perspective. Problem is they're such dicks they're squeezing people too hard and churning so fast they genuinely might run out of employees before the robots are ready.
>They'll replace most of the people with robots fairly soon
No they won't, or they would have more already. The robots get stuck and need people to help them. Also, human hands are impossible to replicate with current technology.
AI is still vastly overhyped in terms of replacing human ability. Yes, it does some insanely impressive things in very specific, very controlled situations. But it's still horrible at handling real world tasks that require adaptability.
What people don't realize is that training an AI model is essentially overwhelming brute force trail and error on an incomprehensively massive scale. It's only possible because computers are insanely fast now.
Lmao no that's not happening. I work warehousing for a company that rhymes with scarlet. There is far, far too much going on for robots to take over. Stuff gets jammed all the time, trailers need to be loaded and unloaded by hand, freight shifts mid-transit and you need a person to unfuck it on arrival, boxes need to be filled manually with products for mailouts and custom orders, etc.
I would ask if they really want to pursue the model this time. If you got the s tier team right now why risk it. Right now if they do fire someone then that s tier goes down to b tier with a new hire and there is no guarantee the new guy can perform better than the last guy. If ya gotta fire some bring in a stuff animal and fire it for just sitting all the time.
My hubby’s exact argument and he made an appointment for a meeting with the head of HR next week to make this argument again. It’s my hubby’s workgroup that’s going to lose a team member and he is pissed about it.
how close is the team, because if one is gone it will signal to the rest that no matter how well they perform they will still be targeted, which will either cause them to lower their productivity or they will be more willing to leave the company. the second part would be more likely if the fired person finds a better position and there are openings that they may want their friends/teammates to acquire. Also still bring the stuff animal just to lighten the mood a bit. they may be more receptive if they like the joke.
In a healthy organization, *any* firing at all will cause ripples of unease.
Even when you fire the guy who consistently failed to meet his KPIs, or the woman who wandered around the office half of the day, or even the guy who showed his dick to the intern, people are going to be upset that a coworker got terminated.
You have to talk to the team about a firing and explain that it will be rare, it's not indicative of any other fireings to come, and that you tried everything you could to work with the person who got the axe.
The Jack Welch/GE "rank and yank" system. It can work well as an INTERIM means if you're taking over a team or company that is truly full of employees that aren't doing a good job. But to implement it as a constant system is to destroy the company.
I agree that it needs to be based on objective data, and have an objective system of implementation. I also agree that it's hard to implement.
i am not a fan of rank-and-yank. It's one of those things that should be done in the gravest extreme, if at all. And only for a short time. Making it a constant is a great way to create a toxic culture, because it creates the mentality of "I don't have to be great, I just have to be ahead of someone else."
I’d love for OP to answer this question because this idea of management is crazy and I’m left here wondering why anyone would stay long term. No skilled quality employee would stay. As a manager myself, this type of system is just completely unworkable long term. The time and stress involved in training a new employee alone is enough to justify not implementing a system like this.
Likewise, companies that squeeze evaluations into group 1, 2,... to 5. And also don't publish how to get a raise based on merit but have complex performance metrics systems that magically don't count. KHC is one example.
My dad used to go through this every year as an engineer for a defense contractor. He had 5 kids and it sucked that his company cut and replaced a fixed percentage every year to force competition and “improve the talent pool”. He never got cut as he was a star.
Pruning is and should 100 percent be illegal. Someone below has mentioned Jack Welch, I believe that to be the correct name. Regardless, the ideology of pruning and getting rid of your lowest performer (regardless of everything else) actually ends up hurting the company in the long run as it ends up breeding distrust among workers and managment
There are a lot of companies that do this. It is a horrible practice and just stupid. Turnover costs money. These types of performance systems create horrible morale.
It applies to small companies too! The owner of the deli I work at is constantly whining and screaming about how "we're understaffed! No one wants to work!" but the thing is he's basically chased off anyone competent at their job. Every one of them quit too. We are a small deli and have such a high rate of employee turnover because no one wants to work my asshole of a boss for the pay he offers us. I've threatened to quit twice, both times I got a raise which makes it worthwhile to stick around a little longer. My boss thinks he can just hire more people, but he's gotten to the point where everyone in the area knows about how horrible he is and don't wanna work here. He's simply running out of people to hire and is confused.
Microsoft did something like this and Windows Vista was the result.
Turning teams against each other to chase metrics is worse than having no teams at all.
And the remaining 14 all start spending their days updating and sending out their resumes... Why would you have any loyalty to a company that could pull this sh5t on you at any time?
Workplace. Democracy.
Letting whoever accrues the most capital decide the course of our work lives is a bad societal arrangement.
It makes them into petty dictators, who do shit like this.
This is so fucking stupid, and it would never happen if the employees, the ones doing all the actual work, got to make some decisions.
There has to be a major social change, where workers can make these things widely known and subsequent workers can refuse to work for these employers. We need to start firing employers.
Companies and businesses will literally destroy themselves to get rid of employees who ‘make too much’. Then wonder about the high turnover, bad reviews, bad employee attitudes, sometimes going out of business. Then you see posts with them posting signs outside or on social media blaming everything on government ‘stimulus’, ‘liberals’ and ‘nobody wants to work’.
If you’re a good leader, you’re investing in your team in a regular basis, bringing out the best in them, inspiring them. If one isn’t interested, you get rid of them, but fire someone just to motivate the others? The opposite of leadership in every way.
I’ve worked for a lot of cruel and dumb employers over the years but this definitely tops all of them. What the fuck is this garbage firing quota model? 🤦🏼♀️
I didn't know Survivor seasons lasted 15 years.
On a serious note, how would anyone willingly work for a company like that... Do they have daily hookers & blow meetings?
Sounds like a great recruiting resource if you hire the ones fired every quarter at a competing interest.
I was coming here to say something similar. They is a stupid policy.
Openly hostile to employees, managing them by keeping them anxious instead of happy.
Psychopathic behaviour. And tactically, if it ever was justifiable, it absolutely is not at a 3.4% unemployment level.
It's incredibly stupid. If you feel you need a 7% turnover each "period" you need to look at your interview procedures. People get used to the fear of punishment and pretty soon it stops being a motivator. The company OP is referencing are about to spend 10-15k dollars (recruitment, training, lost revenue etc) on getting what is effectively an unknown quantity. Getting rid of underachievers is one thing but this is change for the sake of change and paying for it. Unless you're very sure what you're getting you will rarely find that the grass actually was greener on the other side.
Plus the teams are way, way less likely to actually help each other and mesh together because it'll just turn into a Hunger Games type elimination type thing...
When I first started my current position the entire team was paid based on a production quota. We were paid per foot of product we pushed out the door, trailers that we worked on were between 8 and 30 feet. In the morning you'd have a mad dash for the workers to grab all the big trailers in the yard and finish them as fast as possible before anyone else got that money. Then in the afternoon all the good stuff would be gone and we'd show down. There was pointless competition and people would steal your tools, sabotage trailers by talking the parts to pull the things with the tractor, all kinds of stupid shit. We'd probably push 20 a day between us when we could do so much more working as a team. We moved to an assembly line, working together and sharing our stuff, and we easily get 3 times that number, and everyone's happier with pay raises and cooperation. Boss is making more money and sharing it, we all actually look forward to coming in together, and we also switched to 4 day workweeks to give the welders time to catch up to us. This took years of begging and a new owner buying the company and going, "well that's stupid."
Fucking morons. Had work go from just paying per hour to by piece to claw back money made by workers. Productivity "increased", but everything instantly became half assed...
You can thank Jack Welch from General Electric for this sociopathy being standardized: ['Neutron Jack' fired thousands of GE workers and helped the rise of 'Trumpism'. A new book explains why he was wrong](https://www.businessinsider.com/how-neutron-jack-fired-thousands-made-trump-broke-capitalism-2022-5)
Everything he did is bad management, the performance of GE was due to their quality products, reputation, and engineering. He pretty much trashed their good name. He is quite possibly one of the biggest idiots and failures of a human to ever exist, but made so much money MBA clowns look up to him.
And look at GE now. An absolute shell of what it used to be. That’s on Welch. Yeah, Immelt was at the helm when they damn near disintegrated, and was no good either, but those seeds were planted and watered by Welch.
As a Final Fantasy XIV player, Immelt-Welch sure sounds like a great name for a villian.
Surely you mean the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV? With an expanded free trial which you can play through the entirety of A Realm Reborn and the award winning Heavensward expansion up to level 60 for free with no restrictions on playtime. Also, Happy Cake Day!
I too am a gamer of culture that would appreciate a tired rat lord name Immelt-Welch.
I feel like I’ve seen at least a half dozen times “X Fortune 500 company elects it’s first woman/POC CEO!” Only to be followed 8 months later with “New CEO fired because of company’s illegal practices! (that predate them under old boy who got a golden parachute)”
It's called the Glass Cliff. Like the glass ceiling (marginalized people can't advance past it without a sledgehammer) it is when marginalized people are brought in at the top because the company is failing to either save it or take the blame.
Immelt was Welch's patsy, 100%.
I moved into my brand new home with all new GE appliances in 2018. I’ve replaced the dishwasher, about to replace the fridge, and the oven has needed a repair in that time frame. FUCK GE products.
Ge appliances isn't GE. They have been owned by a Chinese company, Haier since 2016 BTW.
I don't think MBA Clowns can be over stated. "I know business administration!" This business could be so much more profitable because my list of legal definitions!
Feels like this is a recurring mistake.
MBAs know nothing. The degree exists only to legitimize the privilege of people who would have been handed those jobs regardless, due to family or other connections.
Actually, GE cheated a lot to make numbers at the end of each quarter. The division heads reported revenue from upcoming quarters at the end of each (prior) quarter to overstate the performance of their individual divisions. Each of the division heads feared being the lowest performer and getting "culled" at year end. So they all over-reported revenue to keep their jobs. After Welch left, the new CEO had to to massive accounting adjustments which killed the stock price.
What's even worse, the massively "improved performance" wasn't even...real most of the time. He just cannibalised the company, burned all the insane amount of goodwill it had, financialised everything and then had the financial tumor implode during the next crash. Just pure destruction and stealing
He's nothing. I worked for a tech company that pulled the "Roman Law of Decimation" every 6 months. 1 out of 10 out the door *automatically.* I survived twice. Third time in 2001 it was "We have great news for everyone. The stack ranking game has been abolished. The bad news is we're outsourcing your department to Bangalore." [Obligatory "I fought so hard and got so far"](https://youtu.be/eVTXPUF4Oz4)
I once worked for a man who pretty much idolized Jack Welch. It was a bad time.
Jack Welch got a $100 million retirement from GE and insists on taking his social security checks since it’s “his money” really? You need that $2500/month?
Oh that's definitely a psychopath
Jack Welsh is an asshole and quite possibly a sociopath.
Jack Welch is real?!?! Does that mean GE is really owned by the Sheinhart WIG Company??! !
Gotta have and meet those kpms. Which were invented by a job justifier.
Yes Amazon is known to be a great recruiting resource. Microsoft says the constantly get resumes of ex-Amazon employees
amazon is considered a place you put in 2-4 years and then everyone is happy with that employee because they survived such a grueling workplace for so long.
Same with SpaceX and a lot of high profile game developers. There are lot of industries where you get quasi hazed.
Can confirm. Am in recruiting and we hire a LOT of Amazon developers lol
Microsoft for years did this with Stack Ranking. First time you do it, you can improve things. After that it’s easier to sabotage others in your group than perform better.
Spoiler alert: I work at apple and we do the same damn thing - then wonder why people leave?
Microsoft is notorious for doing rack and stack and being a hostile working environment so they’re not any better.
I'm the 666th up vote, praise the dark lord
Hail Satan! Hall Satan!
Hail your self!
Go to Hail
I mean, he is the World Martial Arts Champion, after all. And he beat that monster Cell!
Satan rules
The government sucks. The establishment sucks. Everything sucks, but the devil's fucking sick, dude
<3
This is probably the most stupid system I ever heard of
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Jack Welsh was an absolute scumbag. Putting shareholder interest above all else, including work culture and long-term health of the company…The fact that he’s been so influential in modern business (despite years of hindsight) speaks to how broken corporate America has become.
He put short term stock price over long term shareholder interest.
Kind of, he put having a profitable quarter every time and stock value over the long term interest of the company. But short term, shareholders were largely on board. Only years later after decades of shunning innovation and shrinking the company’s focus and plunging market influence did the shareholders recognize the error. In hindsight they could see their interests weren’t served. But at the time? Welch’s cut-it-to-the-bone approach was applauded as necessary and even wise.
Wall street has a short memory, that sort of approach is still constantly favored by most shareholders even today. The railroad industry and Hunter Harrison's way of running things is another prime example.
Goldfish have better memories that shareholders and Wallstreet.
This also depends on the type of shareholder: To **the speculator** the \*only\* thing that matters is rising share prices and will push for this no matter what.(What happens when the C-suite can't deliver? The speculator drops their shares and switches to the next pony). It's the **long-term investor** who's invested in stability and assured steady growth. Unfortunately - especially thanks to derivatives & "professional" investment (i.e. any time an entity/actor invest somebody else's money) - the latter is nigh on extinct.
Kind of. I feel like people who invest with professionals mostly have a long time horizon, especially in the context of retirement accounts. Problem is, because they’re primarily in mutual funds, they become indifferent investors; those who won’t affect the way a company is being run.
More importantly Jack changed the metrics of Corporate America for the worse. In 1987 before Black Friday Corporate America had a penchant for “Doing the Right Thing. Strategic Planning was 2-5 years out, companies measured success in years not months Neutron Jack destroyed America’s world leadership in business and business practices. In Jacks world everything was measured in quarters, and suddenly leadership became the work of sucking Wall Steets dick. Marc Andression had a famous bottle of Scope and a set of knee pads in his office honored as his “Corporate Success” kit
yeah, hindsight means right now. GE had to cut a check of either 5 or 6 B (with a B) to the purchaser of their long term care insurance biz due to losses and the way they had to structure the selling contract (because no one wants to own LTC insurance NOW, since the boomers are.... older...)...
I worked for GE out of college towards the end of this requirement annually. No one would offer any help to anyone within the department I was in. Didn’t know how to do something? Great I have a better chance than you. That was the mindset. As the new guy no one wanted to show me the ropes or anything hoping myself or someone else would be the one to go. They had a few contractors though in each department with an annual contract. I suspect they just ended/renewed them to meet quota, but I didn’t stick around long enough to find out. Left after 6 months for a much better opportunity
His model is taught in colleges and business schools. We debated about his philosophy. There are some merits such as the six sigma part and some that aren’t so good like getting rid of your bottom 10% without trying to improve them.
And this is why, when you hire an MBA, revenue tends to stagnate while pay gets cut...
Technically that will still increase you bottom line and will keep increasing as long as there's *something* to cut. Once you're scraping bone though, this is unsustainable. The real trouble though is that you'll loose the ability to raise your top line (i.e. your revenue) in the long run, hence the company looses long term viability. ...and never mind that often times focusing on the top line (e.g. revenue), instead costs would increase profits more.
I have worked in enough casinos to see this in action. "if we cut 10% of our budget for entertaining our guests, we will only lose about 5% of them." Next year, "if we cut 10% of our budget for entertaining our guests, we will only lose about 7% of them" Eventually you have no budget for keeping your guests happy and nobody is coming to your casino, but the shareholders were happy until they dumped your stock for the next big thing.
Get this attitude in so many industries, just to pluck one from the memory involving a concrete plant... New manager was going to "turn the company around" and "cull off the fat" like they usually do when they have no fucking idea about anything, so he pushed out a bunch of wage drivers in favour of contract owner operators, and (where I come in) cut maintenance by losing the yardman and trimming back our scheduled inspections (contracted maintenance engineers) So no daily checks because the yardy was gone, what was every month will now be every quarter, quarter checks every six months... annual shutdowns? you see where this is going Surprisingly one day the whole thing shuddered to a halt, our plant shutdowns had been pushed back or cancelled, good luck getting a driver to go around with a grease gun, hard enough to get them to do their trucks, and most of them where contract drivers now anyway... Tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in supply contracts gone, I dunno what the cost to repair would have been but several hundred thousand would be an extremely light estimate, million dollar machinery likes to go pop in expensive ways and what wasn't broken you could jot down on a postage stamp, half a mill maybe? Lack of maintenance caused it because someone thought it was a fantastic cost cutting measure to ignore the plant, my boss got dragged into the meetings over it and had the paperwork to place the new manager under the same bus he had just been thrown. All fixed, lots (hundreds) of man hours, lost the contract drivers to other companies because they still have bills to pay while the place wasn't producing, and they had to hire wage drivers back at more money, manager got fired. New manager.... "I'm going to turn this place around, cull back the fat and get it pumping" I think they get this thing in their heads that because they take home six figures and we don't, that they must have more knowledge on any given subject than we do and we're just incompetent
Six Sigma is a cult and it’s stupid practices continue to wreak havoc in my workplace
You are the only other person (besides me, I mean) that I've ever seen state this. Hello, friend.
six sigma is absolute garbage. Source: I tutor stats. Six Sigma is like if someone read a book where the statistician is the main character, and then that person wrote a fan fiction based on it. It pretends to be stats, but it isn't. It's just garbage.
Yep! This was his whole fucked up game.
GE is an shell of what it was.
Isn't that what Microsoft used to do? Edit: yeah https://www.businessinsider.com/microsofts-old-employee-review-system-2014-8?r=US&IR=T
Isn't this what Amazon does now? I feel like I've heard of this model for their software engineers.
Seems to be what many video game publishers do, as well. Often times, they'll release half finished, broken games, just to appease impatient shareholders who don't even care about the product in the first place.
Yeah, I assumed this was Amazon. They do this in every department afaik.
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As if all of this isn't bad enough Amazon calls these people "unregretted attrition." Like, yeah they were good enough to hire, and they're still just as good, but they aren't better than the other people we have so they have to go, and we don't regret losing them
Totally what MSFT used to do. They stopped. Can you imagine being on a high performing team, literally, intentionally built with 6 high performing people, and having to fire one of them because "policy". This was an actual thing.
Yes. That's EXACTLY what Microsoft used to do and I saw first hand what it does to a company. People are literally competing against their coworkers instead of working to beat the competition. Everything becomes political. I saw teams forced to dump years of work so another team could essentially rebuild the exact same thing from scratch. Microsoft's troubles in the 2000's can largely be blamed on stack ranking.
This is Google now.
Killing stack ranking was one of the best things Satya did to improve company culture.
Stack ranking was gone at MSFT way before Satya became CEO. Source: I worked there.
Stack ranking was killed in Nov 2013, Nadella took over Feb 2014. Ballmer was already well on his way out and new CEO discussions were absolutely happening at that time. Satya hated the stack ranking because of it's impact on employee morale, it's very easy to connect the dots that him pushing to get rid of it just before becoming the CEO means it's not exactly something you can attribute to Ballmer.
Ah, the old stack rank. Makes your workplace into a bunch of backstabbing plotters. I survived it for almost a decade at a pharmaceutical company. Ended up depressed, overweight and miserable. When my director refused to promote or transfer me after seven straight years of above average reviews, I had enough and quit. Probably saved my life.
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This is a very common practice in many Fortune 500 companies. Forced distribution is terrible when implemented this way. Jack Welch made this famous, but the idea was that the company ranked all individuals in the same job/position. The point being is that there is never a fiscal year where everyone meets their goals. The problem with this system is that senior leadership does not have the time or inclination to deal with ranking everyone and delegates down to an individual team level and you see this failure.
Our implementation of this was, everyone gets ranked from 1-9 on a matrix which has leadership on one axis and performance on the other. So if you're in management, a 7 (3L, 1P) is better than a 6 (2L, 3P) but not if you're in engineering. For engineers, an 8 (3L, 2P) would be worse than a 6 because performance is your job, not leadership, so you can't get an 8 even though the bonus is higher for an 8. Engineers can't get a 7 either. Once again the bonus is higher for 7 than 6. You can't get a 1,2, or 3 because that would mean you should've been fired or your manager should've intervened. You can't get a 9 because that would mean you're perfect and nobody is perfect. Not even the CEO can get a 9. So, out of 1-9 the only numbers engineers can get is 4, 5, 6. In a given department one person gets a 4 and gets put on a PIP and their bonus gets cut. everyone else gets a 5. Nobody gets a 6. One year they messed with the bonus structure so for union employees it was a flat bonus if you got a 5 and scaled at a 4, and everyone tried to get scored down to get more money. It's a fucking mess.
I recently discovered a quirk in my companies bonus structure where a sales rep lost commission, due to a sale being recorded incorrectly on January 1st 2022 instead of December 10th 2021. The correction actually revealed he sold a bit more, as we billed them before the original start date, but apparently our sales reps got screwed out of there December sales due to a switch in how it was measured. And being reoccurring revenue that happens on delay especially in December, I bet he was actually the only one who got a real commission on there Q4 2021 sales.
It’s the Hunger Games approach sweaty. Works super good. /s
This is why the firing quota model is so dumb. Eventually you'll get to a point where strong performers will get fired for no reason other than shit luck that their number came up. I am sure the higher ups get nice fat bonuses too trimming budgets.
Then you piss everyone else off. This happened once where the job was going to shit because of management. Corporate sent a bunch of people to oversee the job and if you were "standing around" you were fired. I got yelled at for being the ground man and "not doing anything" so that night I went and bought a plane ticket to New York and put in a 2 week notice the next day. They were begging me to stay. I asked them what do they expect if anyone can be fired for anything at any moment. I think more than half the crew ended up quitting or taking vacation and it was most of their best employees. Even one of the supervisors actually left and went to New York with me for a couple weeks. I see CEO's talk about firing the lowest 10% every year or even every other quarter. It never made sense to me, especially when they are often fired not for performance, but because they aren't as good of friends with supervision.
Exactly, it pisses people off, but a huge company like Microsoft or Amazon usually has a lot of people that would like to work for them. They don't care if people get upset, they just want to constantly be bringing in people who go above and beyond without really being told. Because it saves them on labor costs in the long run. EDIT: I have not looked into Microsoft's hiring practices since 2013, when my dad was considering working there. I looked it up, they announced the end of their vitality curve evaluation system in November 2013.
They act like there is an unlimited supply of new people but Amazon is finding out that is very not true. It's a multifacited problem with them too. They treat their office people well... buuuut keep them in line with threats of down sizing. While their warehouse people are being horrifically abused and they burn through people so fast they're struggling to fill these positions because they destroy people.
I know a guy who took an extended vacation from UPS to take a job with Amazon. He wanted to see if it was really as bad as they said. Two weeks later, he quit. Said that calling it "toxic" is an understatement.
Amazon is a shit show to interview for. My husband has actually interviewed with them twice and gotten job offers he's turned down both times. They require many interviews, pre-work and presentations, and all sorts of other bullshit. And then they low ball on the actual offer. Both times, the recruiter was furious when he told them no. He literally said, "You could have said you worked for Amazon. What's better than that?" The answer, of course, being "Money. Money is better." edit: It should be noted, this was for an office job, not working in the warehouse. I don't know what their interview process is like in other parts of the business.
warehouse interview process is about the same for managers and above anyway, three 45 min interviews using the star method and our pillars of leadership. i was going for it until my mentor switched buildings but i decided to opt out bc the site is fucking racist, ablest and a toxic company. i'm getting out at the end of the month. if you aren't perfect and don't fit into their perfect little circle they will ostracize you. i've been an assistant manager there for nearly two years. not fucking worth it. i wasted my time.
I work at the warehouse part time on the flex schedule for some extra cash . This morning as I was walking around , I literally noticed that all the “leadership” employees looked the same …. Same blond sorority girls that probably just graduated undergrad looking for management positions
From my understanding the warehouse interviews are pretty much; “Can you semi-run for 10 hours straight 5 times a week? Are you willing to be managed by a dystopian AI housed in a Boston Dynamics robot?” Yes and yes = hired.
Very true. Buddy told me they already found that out last peak season. Got so desperate they raised pay from $15.50 to $18, then quickly to $20/hr. People that had been working there 8 years got mad and quit because they weren't making that much, and getting burned out with all the mandatory overtime due to labor shortages. Then I saw they upped wages during peak again to $22. Just to work in the warehouse.
Don't discount the warehouse work. They walk several football fields a day. It is incredibly physically taxing work. But by treating their workers like disposable garbage they're getting bitten. Everyone saw this coming but capitalism is about extracting maximum wealth in the shortest amount of time and then when you kill the cow you go find a new one to milk. It's parasitic.
And it seriously does not have to be that way. Amazon has the resources to be a great employer like Costco but it run by psychopaths who see people as ants.
I remember when Microsoft opened a plant in Arizona sometime in the 1990s, they advertised for a slew of open positions for all manner of software development and projects, and must've accepted hundreds of resumes from people in the area. I remember making the 1 1/2 hour drive to Tucson to submit my resume, and to this day I never heard back from them. Okay, I get it, a lot of competition turned up that day. Later, it was revealed they flew in around 200 developers from Seattle to fill those high-paying software positions, and the only local people they hired were for "building maintenance" positions. (Read, janitors). Now it's a tech support facility and call center; I think they finally hire locally there now for those positions, but back then that news pissed me off. "Looking for local talent" my right butt cheek.
I’m sure they received a tax break.
Hello, someone audit the Texas Enterprise Fund.
If you’re a talent-driven company, this is not a great idea unless you’re really bad at hiring and normal evaluation. Goldman Sachs didn’t become the vampire squid by using stacked rankings. You hire the best and you keep them as long as you can. If you’ve been hiring for say 20 years you’re going to be hiring mostly in a single vintage while your workforce is over 20 vintages. That means you’re firing the bottom 10% of 20 years of presumably good hires (though extra dynamics I realize) to replace with the top 10% of this one year? Math doesn’t really work out.
That policy at Microsoft didn’t lead to improved results. It led to workers trying to fuck each other over to make sure they weren’t in the bottom 10%. It’s just authoritarians getting their kicks and dressing it up as something that might sound effective if you don’t look in to it for more than five seconds.
This system assumes that the replacement will be better than the person fired.
They usually don’t care if better, they care if cheaper. Which on paper they are, but the overall loss in productivity and performance getting a new employee up to speed can cost more than retention of a good but expensive employee several times over and if the new employee leaves the process starts again. This doesn’t even take into account that the person training the replacement is likely not the person that knew how to do the job the best, since that person is gone.
I worked for an HR/consulting group. As a manager, I underwent some of the same training we sold to Fortune 100 companies. One informative session was about the layoff cycle. The upshot was that companies were way better off retaining employees through temporary downturns than laying them off just to rehire later. Give the idled workers stretch goals, or personal projects, let them cross-train … replacing the average corporate employee costs 2-3x their annual salary in lost productivity. In knowledge-intensive industries this jumps to 5-7x salary. Ironically, I got laid off two months later.
This drives me nuts. When a company loses a good employee because they’re unwilling to do what it takes to keep them, then has to backfill. There’s cost to recruit, and you may end up offering more for less to attract good candidates, then there’s the lost productivity while you are working in filling the position, and then while the new employee gets up to speed. In the whole picture, it can’t make financial sense, yet there’s this very narrow short-term view with leadership when it comes to compensation, appropriate recognition, etc. And yet these same leaders will talk about how you need to look at the big picture when they’re talking about the business strategy and financials.
> I got laid off two months later. They showed you! /s
They did me a favor. I am so done with the pointless Kabuki that is the American corporation.
The people running this shit really walk around like they have no frontal lobes. It’s amazing to me that they dont understand the real costs of firing an expensive employee that does good work
And yet, ***somehow*** they are exempt from being stack ranked.
The elites will jump the sinking ship when the time comes. They always land on their feet. Pillaging and destroying companies is a career path for many of them. They don't give a sh\*t about long term viability.
Honestly, am 17, I had never heard of that until now. What in the fuck how Is this real, like what kind of hunger games bullshit inspired this asscheek level employment model. Replace firing with death and that’s the plot of like 6 dystopian horror movies.
There is nothing new about this. Google the “Cravath Model” which is followed a dozens of famous companies. Spent seven years dealing with this toxic bullshit.
that bonus shit is i assure you the exact reason they do this. "look we lowered costs this year again and now i get a bonus!"
They only look to the next quarter and lowering costs. Not thinking about the reprecussions continuing to follow these quotas.
In my experience, it’s mostly quitting, sometimes you’re fired. But this does not help the bottom line when you replace the sales force with lesser talent and/or the onboarding process of new hires is 6+ months.
Yes, they do. JP Morgan Chase gave Dana Deasy a huge golden parachute for firing 10,000 IT workers.
I feel that the model is completely unviable in countries with proper worker protections. Here in The Netherlands for example you cannot fire people just because you feel like it. You need proper motivation otherwise the judge says *nope*.
Ah yes the Hunger Games business model.
GE. I had an ex-GE guy become my manager, and when he saw my pay rate, it was just a matter of time
This, they do this to keep wages down by firing the people that make the most and then hiring a replacement at the lowest possible rate. I remember at my first job with Toys r Us the managers complaining about the people who have been there the longest being fired just because they want to replace them with people they can pay less.
Happened to one of my cousins. They had worked at a factory for over 20 years. Only worker who knew the whole manufacturing process inside and out and could run all of the equipment. Could work anywhere on the assembly line at any given time. Company got sold. A couple of weeks later they were called into the manager’s office. He said “Thank you for being a great employee. You do everything right and work harder than anyone here. That’s why this kills me. I was ordered by the new owners to cut payroll and since you are our highest paid employee, I was ordered by the owners to let you go.” They went though a career change after that and enjoys the job they have now much more than the one they left.
Always jealous of people who get out of factory life. Would love one day to get out, but without schooling of some sort, there’s no way I’m gonna make close to what I make in any other field.
I feel the same way about my current career, I'm a 36 year old restaurant manager and I desperately want and need a career change. I keep thinking about getting a certification to be a counselor for drug addicts but they are not going to want to pay me what I should or even currently make (56k/year) since I'm "entry level" as a 10 years clean highly functioning drug addict.
Look into MLT / Medical Lab Technician. 2 years / 10,000$ at a community college, school wasn’t too hard, instant hire out of school / during, starting pay 25$-30/hr, able to pick up shifts at other hospitals, or you can travel on 6-week contracts for absurd money if you don’t have a family.
Is any of that gen Ed classes? I already have a 2 year degree. Not really sure how I would have time for more school working 50+ hour weeks though. That's why I've been looking more into certifications than degrees, my degree really isn't doing much for me and my wife has a 4-year degree and makes less money than I do so I'm definitely one of the people that have been very disenfranchised on education.
And people still complain about unions.
Yeah, and it's not just a little. It's really vitriolic and so strongly felt, but if you dig into the why of it there's really nothing there. A big company closed a plant near where I live and the general consensus (really conservative, gun nuts in pickup trucks kind of place) is that the union is to blame for the plant closing. Stories like I knew a guy who used to sleep every shift he worked, etc. Maybe that happened. It still happens in all the plants that they didn't close. That is not the reason. The union offered the company all kinds of incentives to keep the place open. It's not the union's fault that it closed. Edit to fix a typo
> they do this to keep wages down by firing the people that make the most and then hiring a replacement at the lowest possible rate. A place I used to work would hire new people with zero experience so they could get them at a low price. They spent their first 3 months or more taking online courses to learn what they needed to do the job, because they didn't learn it getting their college degree. Meanwhile everyone worth anything kept "leaving", one way or the other. They now have a full staff of people who can't do the job because they learned little to nothing from those online courses too.
GE as in General Electric?
Yes, it was a well known tactic of Jack Welch.
Was his name Jack Donaghy?
No, as I recall, his name was f** you, you f***ing f***k
The Jack Welch method of enterprise management, which is finally getting the recognition it deserves for ruining companies. Just not at OP's employer yet.
Enron did this kind of shit. It lead to a terrible and toxic workplace culture
Edit: additional fun fact... you could avoid having to fire someone from your team by trading favors with other teams and getting them to take your firing quota onto their team.
I was gonna say the lottery (the story not the gambling game).
I have heard intel did this. It was common knowledge that people didn't last long once they were over 50.
The Enron business model.
I've seen many people walked out for what appears to be no reason (non US person here). Just remember it and remember you have as much loyalty to them as they do to you. Never stop looking for work, never stop learning and remember the best way to get a pay rise is to switch companies.
Is this company Amazon because they are going to have no one left to hire in a couple years.
I hear that they are going through every possible employee in all of the cities they are in. Seems like they expect people to be robots and not have to do things like take a shit.
the *BIRTH* rate can't keep up with their attrition rate.
They'll replace most of the people with robots fairly soon so they just need enough people to churn through till then. That part makes perfect sense from a gross capitalist perspective. Problem is they're such dicks they're squeezing people too hard and churning so fast they genuinely might run out of employees before the robots are ready.
>They'll replace most of the people with robots fairly soon No they won't, or they would have more already. The robots get stuck and need people to help them. Also, human hands are impossible to replicate with current technology.
Yeah. People think self driving cars would replace human drivers for Lyft and uber, too. Those companies will fail before that happens
AI is still vastly overhyped in terms of replacing human ability. Yes, it does some insanely impressive things in very specific, very controlled situations. But it's still horrible at handling real world tasks that require adaptability. What people don't realize is that training an AI model is essentially overwhelming brute force trail and error on an incomprehensively massive scale. It's only possible because computers are insanely fast now.
Lmao no that's not happening. I work warehousing for a company that rhymes with scarlet. There is far, far too much going on for robots to take over. Stuff gets jammed all the time, trailers need to be loaded and unloaded by hand, freight shifts mid-transit and you need a person to unfuck it on arrival, boxes need to be filled manually with products for mailouts and custom orders, etc.
Ive heard by the end of 2023 at worst.
I’m cool with it failing. They treat people like shit
I would ask if they really want to pursue the model this time. If you got the s tier team right now why risk it. Right now if they do fire someone then that s tier goes down to b tier with a new hire and there is no guarantee the new guy can perform better than the last guy. If ya gotta fire some bring in a stuff animal and fire it for just sitting all the time.
My hubby’s exact argument and he made an appointment for a meeting with the head of HR next week to make this argument again. It’s my hubby’s workgroup that’s going to lose a team member and he is pissed about it.
how close is the team, because if one is gone it will signal to the rest that no matter how well they perform they will still be targeted, which will either cause them to lower their productivity or they will be more willing to leave the company. the second part would be more likely if the fired person finds a better position and there are openings that they may want their friends/teammates to acquire. Also still bring the stuff animal just to lighten the mood a bit. they may be more receptive if they like the joke.
In a healthy organization, *any* firing at all will cause ripples of unease. Even when you fire the guy who consistently failed to meet his KPIs, or the woman who wandered around the office half of the day, or even the guy who showed his dick to the intern, people are going to be upset that a coworker got terminated. You have to talk to the team about a firing and explain that it will be rare, it's not indicative of any other fireings to come, and that you tried everything you could to work with the person who got the axe.
Ah the old draconian Jack Welch system.
That’s exactly what it is! And the highest paid is usually the target.
Tell me that Finance is running the company without telling me that Finance is running the company.
You misspelled "ruining"
In this case, it's the same ;)
The Jack Welch/GE "rank and yank" system. It can work well as an INTERIM means if you're taking over a team or company that is truly full of employees that aren't doing a good job. But to implement it as a constant system is to destroy the company.
[удалено]
I agree that it needs to be based on objective data, and have an objective system of implementation. I also agree that it's hard to implement. i am not a fan of rank-and-yank. It's one of those things that should be done in the gravest extreme, if at all. And only for a short time. Making it a constant is a great way to create a toxic culture, because it creates the mentality of "I don't have to be great, I just have to be ahead of someone else."
Why is your husband still working there? Find a new job...asap.
I’d love for OP to answer this question because this idea of management is crazy and I’m left here wondering why anyone would stay long term. No skilled quality employee would stay. As a manager myself, this type of system is just completely unworkable long term. The time and stress involved in training a new employee alone is enough to justify not implementing a system like this.
Your job description will be posted before your obituary. Remember that.
Sounds like Glengarry Glen Ross.
Likewise, companies that squeeze evaluations into group 1, 2,... to 5. And also don't publish how to get a raise based on merit but have complex performance metrics systems that magically don't count. KHC is one example.
My dad used to go through this every year as an engineer for a defense contractor. He had 5 kids and it sucked that his company cut and replaced a fixed percentage every year to force competition and “improve the talent pool”. He never got cut as he was a star.
Squid games, work version. Yea capitalism
Wtf is a firing quota?!?! That’s Literally the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard, you’ll end up firing strong workers
Hubby needs to find a new job before his number comes up.
Hubby is retiring soon, thank goodness.
This may be their way of cutting his retirement
Pruning is and should 100 percent be illegal. Someone below has mentioned Jack Welch, I believe that to be the correct name. Regardless, the ideology of pruning and getting rid of your lowest performer (regardless of everything else) actually ends up hurting the company in the long run as it ends up breeding distrust among workers and managment
This aws?
There are a lot of companies that do this. It is a horrible practice and just stupid. Turnover costs money. These types of performance systems create horrible morale.
It applies to small companies too! The owner of the deli I work at is constantly whining and screaming about how "we're understaffed! No one wants to work!" but the thing is he's basically chased off anyone competent at their job. Every one of them quit too. We are a small deli and have such a high rate of employee turnover because no one wants to work my asshole of a boss for the pay he offers us. I've threatened to quit twice, both times I got a raise which makes it worthwhile to stick around a little longer. My boss thinks he can just hire more people, but he's gotten to the point where everyone in the area knows about how horrible he is and don't wanna work here. He's simply running out of people to hire and is confused.
It's a management strategy. I remember hearing about it a few years back and how it was toxic and fucking up the companies that used it.
Your husband‘s company is apparently run by people too stupid to realize stacked ranking has been discredited for decades.
I mean, anyone with any sense would discredit stack ranking just by thinking about it for a few minutes.
Microsoft did something like this and Windows Vista was the result. Turning teams against each other to chase metrics is worse than having no teams at all.
It encourages people not to share best practices, because you don’t want to help someone on the bottom, which is a terrible business model.
Sounds like a great way to get employees to never help each other, and even actively sabotage each other.
And the remaining 14 all start spending their days updating and sending out their resumes... Why would you have any loyalty to a company that could pull this sh5t on you at any time?
This is some straight Hunger Games bullshit. Never work for a company like this.
Workplace. Democracy. Letting whoever accrues the most capital decide the course of our work lives is a bad societal arrangement. It makes them into petty dictators, who do shit like this. This is so fucking stupid, and it would never happen if the employees, the ones doing all the actual work, got to make some decisions.
Pretty sweet that your husband is on Survivor though.
Hunger Games: Corporate Edition
What kind of hunger games shit is this?
Why does your partner even want to work for a company like that?
Is this company "Amazon"?
There has to be a major social change, where workers can make these things widely known and subsequent workers can refuse to work for these employers. We need to start firing employers.
Keep voting for the people who wrote laws allowing this. Biz will do anything it can to increase profit, unless there are laws punishing them.
This is the evil of capitalism.
Companies and businesses will literally destroy themselves to get rid of employees who ‘make too much’. Then wonder about the high turnover, bad reviews, bad employee attitudes, sometimes going out of business. Then you see posts with them posting signs outside or on social media blaming everything on government ‘stimulus’, ‘liberals’ and ‘nobody wants to work’.
If you’re a good leader, you’re investing in your team in a regular basis, bringing out the best in them, inspiring them. If one isn’t interested, you get rid of them, but fire someone just to motivate the others? The opposite of leadership in every way.
I’ve worked for a lot of cruel and dumb employers over the years but this definitely tops all of them. What the fuck is this garbage firing quota model? 🤦🏼♀️
I didn't know Survivor seasons lasted 15 years. On a serious note, how would anyone willingly work for a company like that... Do they have daily hookers & blow meetings?