re: CEO responds to 'painful' video of employee who went viral after being fired

After watching that video, I have a theory. I think that her manager was also performing poorly, and was let go prior to the meetings with the team. He was not managing his team to their goals and was not holding them accountable. This would account for the manager being absent from the call and the fact that neither one of the HR bots mentioned consulting with him to get her more information. If that is the case then they won’t publicly say anything because it would be a confidential personnel matter.

Now, in the absence of proper training, coaching, and managing, is it fair to let these employees go? That’s a different matter. Again- conjecture, but I’m guessing they were still in a “probationary” new hire period which makes it much easier for them to let people go. Not as much performance documentation and less HR hoops to jump through. As such, they wanted to cut ties now, rather than see if with a better manager performance would improve and old habits would be trained out. I’m sure someone did the math on the cost to replace these employees and it worked out to go ahead and replace them.

An aside- I’ve worked (for a short time) managing in a company which had adopted the plan that a certain percentage of the workforce were going to be rated as needing improvement. The philosophy was that we should be getting rid of a certain percentage of employees each year to (hopefully) replace them with better performers. I hated that philosophy. Didn’t make sense to me. Mathematically, of course it sounds good. In the real world, dealing with people, it doesn’t work if you are at all concerned with employee morale (more pizza, awesome!) and well-being.