In the dim and distant past, when I was a bossman, a small division of
the company that started out as very profitable with two employees,
after four years, had become decidedly unprofitable with just one
employee, mainly because her attitude got customers' backs up. I decided
to simply close the division, rather than to struggle to revive it. I
gave the very tearful employee her oral then written notice (she was
surprised, despite previous warnings and she knew the turnover had
dropped to a level that wouldn't even pay her salary, let alone the
overheads and social charges). I gave her the statutory 3 months notice
but I said that, if she found a job in the meanwhile, she could leave at
any time. I also said she could use all the firm's facilities (phone,
fax, word processor etc.) to help her find a job and she could absent
herself for interviews provided she announced when she did so. Despite
the fact that the job market was in recession, she landed another job in
about three weeks and she left us without recriminations at the end of
four weeks.
The only others I sacked were in their 3-month trial period. One was an
engineer (summa cum laude!!!) straight from the Swiss Federal Institute
of Technology after graduation. He had a brilliant mind and seized the
theory of our work without difficulty but, as a practician, he was
hopeless. He was supposed to visit local clients, find out their
problems with our instruments and machines then develop
hardware/software accordingly. Hardware? He could hardly understand a
semiconductor data sheet and I'm sure he would grab a soldering iron by
the wrong end. The last straw was an important SME client, who was also
a personal friend, phoned me and asked me whether I knew that this guy
had an ethanol problem. I tackled him on his return and found that he
had a bottle of whisky in his (company) car. He said he needed a stiff
drink to give him the courage to visit a customer. I explained to him
that it was exactly that which was his undoing and I gave him two hours
to vacate the premises and leave the car in clean condition, but I paid
him to the end of the month (not legally necessary).
The other one was a calibration technician. He was as useless as a
chocolate teapot. After a month, my senior calibration guy explained
that this nincompoop had learned zilch in a month and he was upsetting
the smooth running of the department because the senior guy had to sit
with him full time to explain the same thing time after time after time.
Instead of helping, the throughput of the department dropped by 75%. I
asked him to leave illico presto and found another one, a Spaniard, who
looked like a punk but was the best techie we ever had. He stayed with
us for ten years and left only because of a family crisis in Spain.
Brian
Bev Christian wrote:
> OR a company can do it as well as can be expected. For instance, when I got
> laid off by Fiberglas Canada (Owens Corning subsidiary) in 1989, they:
> 1) Let us know in advance by several weeks that a lay off was coming
> 2) Told us why it was coming
> 3) Did it all within a couple of hours
> 4) Had our own managers tell us individually
> 5) Immediately assigned us to a counselor from the moment we left the
> manager's office
> 6) Quickly took us to a room with said counselor and 7 of our compatriots
> where we could talk about how we felt and to explain what was next
> 7) Gave us two weeks to clean out our offices on company time
> 8) Gave us a three day course on how to look for work (I still have that
> binder.), with mock taped interviews, etc.
> 9) Set us all up in an office (an old bank, ironically) for three months
> with a table, phone, no charge for long distance phone calls, a secretary,
> photocopier and several daily newspapers of major Canadian cities.
> 10) Oh, and one month's severance for every year worked and half a month's
> pay if there was an additional half month worked.
>
> My manager was the perfect English gentleman throughout. I remember that
> one other manager broke down giving his purchasing agent the bad news. But
> the good part is the guy getting laid off, who had been with the company
> since high school, got severance for, I think, about 15 years of service.
> Then they brought him back full time within a few months, then laid him off
> again, gave him a full severance, brought him back a third time and then
> laid him off and AGAIN gave him a full severance from the time he had
> originally joined the company. Talk about making out like a bandit!
>
> For myself I then a got a great job with Nortel that I stayed at for ten
> years, nine and a half wonderful years and six months of crap, but that's
> another story.
>
> Bev
> On vacation
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: TechNet [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of R Sedlak
> Sent: Friday, July 10, 2009 4:47 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: [TN] On the way to being unemployed....
>
> The thing that most people lose track of is that, at the end of the day, the
> corporation needs good people more than the people need a specific
> corporation...
>
> I have been in this sort of situation a number of times, and have managed to
> dodge the bullet by going out BEFORE being laid off, and finding a job, and
> then going to management, and saying that as much as I LOVE this place, and
> do not want to leave, I must, unless I get a guarantee, in writing, that I
> will not be laid off for at least a year.�� I got the guarantee in one case,
> and in the other, got to walk out (to a new job) a week ahead of when I
> would have been laid off.
>
> The concept is best described as being pro-active, or Carpe Diem?
> Rudy Sedlak
> ----------------------
>
>
>
>
>
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