Businesses must realise letting go of employees cannot be the sole option

Though the US is the only country - on record- practising at-will employment, where anyone can be fired without a reason, many GCC countries had been following this practice for expats until recently.

As experts will agree, the state of people management remains poor in many parts of the world. In a pre-pandemic report by Gallup, the quit rate was at an all-time high: 67 per cent of employees are disengaged at work and more than half were actively looking for a new job. Clearly, HR lacks a commitment to evidence-based people management.

The HR practices that remain in use, notwithstanding the evidence against them like the ‘forced curve performance’ evaluations, stem from one root cause: the ability to fire employees even if the laws are not in favour. Because of this, workplaces are prone to use counterproductive management approaches that evaluate rather than invest in and develop employees.

Lots of people lose jobs every year. The last two years have been particularly harsh due to the pandemic. There is evidence that being fired is not a sign of incompetence, but possibly an organizational mistake.

A 10-year study found that 91 per cent of those who got fired found a job as good or better than the one they lost, and 78 per cent eventually rose to become CEOs. The idea that the solution to poor performance is termination produces numerous unproductive approaches to managing people.

A ‘growth mindset’ is far better than an evaluating mindset – multiple research data prove this. An ‘evaluating mindset’ implies that if a salesgirl is not meeting her target, the diagnosis is that she can’t sell and should be either fired or moved to a different role.

A growth mindset, on the other hand, implies that if a salesperson is currently not effective, that individual might benefit from training in sales techniques and coaching from mentors. It implies that not only should individuals play to their strengths but also that many people, with the right information, development, and mindfulness, could develop new strengths.

Implementing a growth mindset is difficult and requires more than just espousing it. If people are readily replaced, the temptation to fire them and find someone else can be overwhelming. If employers would think of firing as a last resort - or consider the evidence on the effectiveness and importance of mindsets and if labour policy makes it more difficult and costly to remove people - they would be more likely to actually embrace a growth mindset.

Performance reviews, which many managers hate giving and few employees like receiving, may be the most detrimental HR practice when it comes to developing a growth mindset.

Evaluations presumably identify who needs to go on performance improvement plans, and are used to rank people against each other. If firing people weren’t at the forefront of these reviews, HR managers might still want to provide developmental information, but it almost certainly would take a very different form.

The conversation would focus on how the employee could improve and what the employer and employee could jointly do to develop the competencies, not “grades.” Instead of being performed annually, developmental conversations could occur all the time.

Consider this logic. Unless the company is downsizing, every person fired needs to be replaced. Unless the company has somehow improved its selection process, or done something to become a more attractive place to work, the organization will just return to the same labour pool from which it drew the now-fired individual, with the same deal, and draw again.

What are the odds it will do better? That is why companies that fire people tend to do it again and again, because these actions don’t solve anything.

Here’s a useful analogy. Almost no parents have ever “fired” their child. When the child misbehaves or doesn’t live up to their potential, great parents provide love, attention, guidance and motivation, and work hard to ensure the best possible outcome for the kid.

Wouldn’t it be nice if companies did the same to employees? Instead of firing, give them second, third, or more chances. Invest in them. Provide them the social support necessary for physical and mental health, and the opportunity to do better.

Fulfilling people’s promise requires a commitment to their development that the opportunity to simply get rid of them renders unlikely.