how to find a balance between efficiency and empathy

The most obvious consequence on the surface is the loss of knowledge and information leakage. The employee you are trying to fire will not be willing to transfer cases and fill in the gaps in the project knowledge base. He can very quickly, literally tomorrow, find a job with a competitor and start leaking information, even confidential information, and steal your employees and clients.

Also, the layoff situation can lead to demoralization of the team. People will think that the company is unstable and someone will be next.

In addition, in the context of the Labor Code of the Russian Federation, the employee is well protected. In 2023, 59% of labor disputes over dismissals in Russian courts ended in favor of employees, who were then reinstated in their jobs. I know of a case, fortunately not in my team, when a person was fired, but he was reinstated and returned to his previous team. He did not perform the tasks, only morally corrupted the team, thereby undermining the authority of the team leader. After a few months, the employee got tired of it: he found another job and quit. Formally, the company could not take any action against him.

Onboarding a new employee

Now let's look at it from the other side: what resources does bringing in a new employee require?

Firstly, there are always expenses for replacing the fired employee. Someone has to do his job. Secondly, onboarding a new person also takes time and money. Ultimately, the person may not be right for you or “not fit in” with the team. And the money for onboarding and hiring will be wasted.

In a situation where there is a shortage of specialists on the market and high staff turnover in IT, there is something to think about. For example, according to the results of a study by the Antal agency, staff turnover in IT was 34% in 2023. That is, every third person in IT quit during 2023.

Therefore, if you have an idea to fire someone, the first thing you need to think about is: is it possible to avoid this dismissal? And the priority should be to keep the existing employee.

When layoffs can be avoided

In my opinion, there are two main scenarios when a person can be saved:

If the problem is only in work skills, then they can really be improved in a year. It is usually easier to improve a person's knowledge to the required level than to hire a new one and experience all the risks associated with hiring.

One of my teams had a manual tester, with whom many were unhappy. The team had few testing tasks, and others tried to give him other tasks, for example, in development and analytics. But the person could not cope with anything except his work as a tester. The team leader wanted to fire him. We started looking for a solution and allocated the tester to three teams, each of which had tasks within his competencies. The employee stayed, adapted to the teams and worked great. This is how we kept the specialist and improved his relationships with other teams.

For example, I had a demanding and conflict-prone client. Not all employees could work with her. She wanted to replace several people on the project at once, because she was not satisfied with the interaction with them. Someone really had to be removed from the project, but we saved some people by simply removing them from the front line of communication with the client. That is, the person somewhere in the background continued to perform their duties. In this situation, I was very worried about my colleagues, but it was difficult to argue with the client.

These were situations when it is definitely worth considering measures to keep an employee on the team, but there are situations when dismissal must happen.

When dismissal is unavoidable

There are objective and subjective reasons for dismissal.

Objective reasons for layoffs: a project or direction is closed, funding is cut, a division is restructured. At the same time, staff reduction is not necessarily a one-time action, it can last for years.

But there are also subjective reasons for dismissal, usually related to communication within the team. Here I highlight two red flags:

As an example, I will give a case with an analyst in one of the teams. On the daily, he constantly shared negative forecasts that we would not cope with the project, it would be a failure, the customer would not accept the results of the work, and we were doing nonsense. With his whining, he essentially plunged the team into despondency. I tried to persuade him: “Okay, think of something, how we can get out of the crisis, do something,” but in response there were no proposals. The only thing we managed to do with him was that we gave him only routine tasks that were within his capabilities. And after a few months, having waited for a convenient moment, we replaced him with a new person.

When I first started managing teams in IT, I lacked experience and knowledge. There was a case when one person refused to obey me. The situation was complicated by the fact that initially we worked on equal roles, and then I became a leader. Although this is not an uncommon situation. He said that he would not come to the office at the right time, would not show up for a meeting – he was openly sabotaging. I was unable to cope with this at the time, and I had to part ways with the person. As far as I know, he even left IT after that.

Also, in addition to the two red flags, to assess how objective your desire to fire a person is, try to answer the following questions first:

• Why do I want to fire him?

• Is this an objective problem or my bias?

• Can this employee's experience be applied to another team?

• Who else has problems with him besides me?

7 Steps to Quitting

If after trying to reflect on the situation you have decided that you need to part ways with the person, then I suggest you go through my guide. It consists of seven steps and will help you not to miss anything and avoid serious consequences for the manager, team and business.

Step 1: Second Chance

First, you need to tell the employee what he is doing wrong. Discuss the situation together, work out some measures, and, of course, give him some time to correct the shortcomings. Three months is usually enough. During this time, you regularly provide feedback. Therefore, if dismissal is required, there will be no surprises.

Step 2: Timeframe for finding a replacement

While the specialist is trying to improve, you need to act in parallel in case he/she fails to improve. Your task at this step is to understand how difficult it is to find a replacement for this specialist and how much time it will take.

There are specializations that no one wants to go to or they are already dying, for example, import substitution stack, there are simply no such specialists on the market. Try to find an adequate replacement first.

I had a technical specialist on my team, whose work many people were unhappy with. I was unhappy myself, but when I was asked to replace him, I suggested first finding someone who could perform these tasks. In the end, no replacement was found and the person continued to work for several more years.

Step 3: Direct conversation

If a team member was unable to eliminate the shortcomings in their work, then a direct conversation about dismissal is inevitable. I recommend having it with the employee one-on-one, because this is your individual working relationship with them. If such a meeting seems too difficult, invite support in the form of an HR business partner (HRBP) or your manager. But you need to understand that it may be difficult for a person to perceive a configuration when several people are talking about their dismissal at once. They may feel threatened, as if a “wall” is coming at them.

In general, be prepared for any reaction. There was a case when a person did not want to finish the conversation and ran after me along the corridor. I am not a timid person, but at some point I became scared.

Step 4: Dissenters

At this step, you need to understand who in the company potentially disagrees with your decision and will create problems. Perhaps this person being fired has worked in the company for a long time and has built a great relationship with your customer, or your chief engineer is this person's godfather (brother, matchmaker). You also need to prepare to talk to people who disagree one-on-one. The conversation needs to be carefully thought out to neutralize a possible negative reaction.

I had a dismissal in my experience, about which I still feel sadness and regret. The employee was very technically competent, but, unfortunately, he did not cope with the role of team management at all. And he understood it himself. Psychologically, the situation was such that he could not stay in the same team as just a developer. Plus, the customers treated him very well, which meant that it was necessary to talk about and explain why the employee was leaving. Fortunately, everything went well, the customers did not object. Nevertheless, for us there was a risk of a negative reaction from them.

Step 5: Legal aspect

If you are close to dismissal, sort out the legal side. I do not recommend doing this alone, it is better to involve HRBP or labor dispute lawyers. A good option would be an internal bench or rotation of personnel within the company. This is in almost all large companies, and business, as a rule, is very interested in this.

For example, I had several people leave my teams this way. Then I followed their fate and I know that these people found themselves in new teams very well. But this measure is suitable if the employee is generally good, but did not work well with someone specific and their skills are needed elsewhere. In other cases, the issue needs to be worked out more deeply.

A few things to know:

• The best option is a mutual agreement, which is almost impossible to challenge in court.

• I don’t recommend firing through staff reduction.

In order to lay off a person, you need to convene a committee and justify why this particular person's position is being laid off from all the people with the same positions in this department. Along the way, many circumstances may arise that will work in his favor, for example, young children under 14, or he is the only breadwinner in the family, or he has completed specialized training in the last year.

My friend is a project administrator. They tried to fire her under pressure. The situation was hopeless, two small children, and a completely random lawyer friend. Fortunately, it didn't come to a scandal, everything was settled, but the situation was quite unpleasant.

I teach courses for team leaders at my company. In one of the tasks, we discussed the grounds for dismissal, and one of the team leaders suggested using Jira to record unfulfilled tasks. In fact, it's not that simple. It's hard to prove non-fulfillment, and it's not done by setting tasks in Jira. Probably the only option to fire for cause is if the person is truly an objectively malicious truant or does not communicate. In other cases, the task is marked with an asterisk, since it is necessary to formally take a serious approach to recording violations.

Step 6: Self-reflection

When you have already broken up with a person, it is important to digest and reflect on everything, because the reaction can be very emotional for both you and the dismissed person. He may even stop talking to you.

There were cases when I had to part with people whom I had known for a long time and was afraid to ruin the relationship. As I already said, the IT world is small, and a situation may arise when this person will have to be hired again. In this sense, I really like the phrase of Steve Jobs:

I can fire someone and then call them to discuss a project or hire them again. I don't care about the past, only the present.

Steve Jobs

This is about the fact that you need to fire him in such a way that you can hire him later.

Step 7: Team Communication

The last final step is to discuss what is happening with the team in a competent manner. People can imagine completely unrealistic things. They can think of some financial threats, potential layoffs, or something like that. They can think that the dismissal will affect them themselves. If you are not really going to disband the team, then you need to reduce the anxiety in the team and tell them the details: who will take the place of the dismissed person and how the work will continue. And, of course, explain why this person left the team.

Conclusions

First and foremost, always try to keep the employee. Look for an opportunity to transfer to another team or department, give them time to retrain or improve their skills, review the work schedule and specific tasks. Analyze the market — how long will it take to find a replacement if the employee is fired and assess your resources. There is a big shortage of personnel and high turnover in IT. If it is impossible to keep the employee, approach the task of firing in stages, using the guide from this article: plan a conversation, assess those who are potentially opposed to the dismissal and discuss the prospects with them, analyze the legal grounds together with a specialist, communicate with the team. Find a way to fire a person without an acute conflict in order to remain in adequate relations after, when the emotions settle.

In general, I wish you never to fire, but always to hire.