What if you never fired an employee? I listened to an interview of Bob Chapman (on Simon Sinek’s channel…thanks Grant!) and Bob says that life changed for him when he realized every person was someone’s precious child. Seeing people as children then caused him to realize that he was the parent….
So, he never said that his company never fired people – just that they didn’t use layoffs to improve the company’s position, since, people are truly the most important assets a company contains. Obviously, if you want to improve the company’s health, you don’t dispose of the assets that produce your products!!
But, I got to thinking….what if you never fired an employee. When you hire them, you adopt them for life? Like a child…That means, if there was a parting of the ways, it was the child’s choice…the employee’s choice.
That is God’s plan too….He adopts a child, but there can be a parting of the ways if the child so chooses, as God never forces a person to be with Him if the person doesn’t want to be. I brought up this in my nursing home Bible study service yesterday, and it spawned a memory that I shared – a Christian man who had swallowed pre-determinism hook, line, and sinker..so much so that in proving his point to me, he grabbed his daughter’s hand and told her to try to pull away from him. That, he said, is how secure we are in our salvation once we are adopted. Well, secure is one way to say it…perhaps imprisoned might be closer to the truth! Ohh dear one, that’s not my Father….He doesn’t act that way…and it is a sad distortion you are making of his Goodness.
I don’t think He casts away any that want to be with Him, and He certainly doesn’t coerce any to stay who want to be far from Him.
What about my company? If an employee wants to be with my company, can’t I find a way for him to contribute? If I hired him in at $20/hour but he’s only producing $15/hour in value, then it seems like a very straight-forward thing to inform him of this and reduce his pay to reflect his production. In so doing, I would acknowledge my error in judgment and also work with him to provide a way where he can increase his productive value (training, mindset, character, etc) to his desired level.
What about an employee who hurts or is just a bad egg?! What does God do when I’m not only not productive, but even destructive? He allows distance and a loss of fellowship to bring me back to my senses. Why can’t that apply? True, if an employee is hurting others, then it would be unloving and unhelpful for me to let them continue to do so. Why can’t I reassign them to a place within my company where they can’t hurt people, maybe a ‘padded’ office to themselves where they are being encouraged to change and receiving the training to improve? If they produce nothing, they receive nothing, so that kind of takes care of the financial drag on the company during which time they are not productive…
I wonder if this model has little chance of succeeding, not because it makes no sense, but because it requires some very very hard skills/tasks beforehand.
- A super clear job description with defined outcomes and the economic value along a continuum of those outcomes
- Accurate and real-time assessing with an acute willingness to be constantly measuring and reporting progress.
- Elimination of human bias from manager to employee — you can’t ignore bad performance because you ‘like’ someone, and you can’t ignore good performance (or improvement) because you ‘dislike’ someone. This second part, I think, is mostly why the model fails – as soon as a manager perceives that someone isn’t contributing at the expected level, it becomes emotionally easier to stop pouring into that person so that we can facilitate the self-fulfilling prophecy that they are a failure rather than honestly addressing one’s own bias and laziness – we don’t want to change our minds (or the minds of others around us) when a person actually changes and improves, as that forces us to reconstruct our view of that person.
Who is willing to try this?!?! Anyone?
So, professor, what did we learn?
We treat the worker as a tool to trade,
And drop the asset when the ledger dips;
We break the promise that was softly made,
With cold, efficiency upon our lips.
Yet every soul that walks into the shop
Is someone’s child, entrusted to our care;
We ought to build them up and never stop,
And offer work that is both just and fair.
The Father never forces hands to stay,
Nor locks the door to keep His children bound;
He lets the prodigal pursue his way,
Yet leaves the light to guide him home when found.
To lead is not to cast the weak aside,
But teach the willing hand with honest guide.