Cf almost-obvious business advice I’ve given people: get rid of bad employees ASAP. Don’t wait around to see if they might improve—they won’t, and will only get entrenched (especially if they have psychopathic traits and are in a senior position), making it more disruptive to get rid of them later.
BUT the same applies, less obviously, to merely mediocre employees. Because they can hang around for years, half-assing it and dragging those around them down, occupying a position that could be filled by someone far better, but not quite bad enough to require dismissal.
(This may be less of a problem in the US, where ‘fire at will’ is standard and maybe rapidly acted on, than say the UK where I am.)
(This advice incidentally highlights an apparent difference between the private and public sectors, the latter (in the UK at least, by all accounts) having too many mediocre people who are never fired, due to union pressure, a time-serving work culture, etc.)
I’d say the vast majority of cases I know of, within the US, involve firing too late rather than too early. The reason is straightforward: it sucks to fire people, knowing that you’ll potentially have a severe negative impact on their life, so most managers will put it off as long as possible.
This incidentally raises the question of what would count as ‘firing too early’. Before it’s become clear whether someone is a bad/mediocre employee rather than starting off on the wrong foot or taking time to get used to their role? (Would be clearer in the case of a bad than a mediocre employee, naturally.)
(A friend of mine was quickly fired from a remote working programming job during COVID, I think because he skipped one of their regular online team meetings without good reason. He’d been half-assing it so much in his previous job in a media company (where no-one did any work) I think he assumed he could get away with and talk his way out of anything, so this came as a shock to him. Sounds like they were right to fire him for the sloppy attitude he had acquired, of which this incident was a single but clear signal.)
Cf almost-obvious business advice I’ve given people: get rid of bad employees ASAP. Don’t wait around to see if they might improve—they won’t, and will only get entrenched (especially if they have psychopathic traits and are in a senior position), making it more disruptive to get rid of them later.
BUT the same applies, less obviously, to merely mediocre employees. Because they can hang around for years, half-assing it and dragging those around them down, occupying a position that could be filled by someone far better, but not quite bad enough to require dismissal.
(This may be less of a problem in the US, where ‘fire at will’ is standard and maybe rapidly acted on, than say the UK where I am.)
(This advice incidentally highlights an apparent difference between the private and public sectors, the latter (in the UK at least, by all accounts) having too many mediocre people who are never fired, due to union pressure, a time-serving work culture, etc.)
I’d say the vast majority of cases I know of, within the US, involve firing too late rather than too early. The reason is straightforward: it sucks to fire people, knowing that you’ll potentially have a severe negative impact on their life, so most managers will put it off as long as possible.
This incidentally raises the question of what would count as ‘firing too early’. Before it’s become clear whether someone is a bad/mediocre employee rather than starting off on the wrong foot or taking time to get used to their role? (Would be clearer in the case of a bad than a mediocre employee, naturally.)
(A friend of mine was quickly fired from a remote working programming job during COVID, I think because he skipped one of their regular online team meetings without good reason. He’d been half-assing it so much in his previous job in a media company (where no-one did any work) I think he assumed he could get away with and talk his way out of anything, so this came as a shock to him. Sounds like they were right to fire him for the sloppy attitude he had acquired, of which this incident was a single but clear signal.)