Fire Them or Fix Them - Book Report/Review Example

Fire them or fix them In this book the believes there are more far reaching benefits to fix an underperforming employee than to fire an employee for the following reasons. Legal tussles: Managers avoid the confrontation and procedural and legal hassles of an employee termination therefore they create an environment in which there is no real threat of employee termination. Most managers perceive the hassles of firing someone as not being worth their risk but this can led to wrongful dismissal lawsuits. This situation is compounded when the employee could have a discrimination claim based on his or her status as a member of preferred group.(Shaer 3) Economical costs. “Hiring and training a new employee is a lot more expensive and time consuming than counseling an existing employee to get his or her performance up to par. There is also the uncertainty of the efficiency of the new employee compared to the one that was just fired”.( Shaer 4) The effort and time of interviewing and hiring, training, and mentoring the employee. “With much of that work the manager and after all of that, manager then face the risk that the new employee might not perform well, in which case you will have to do it all over again”. It could take months before your team reaches the productivity level you need. “This risk is often daunting for many managers, and it can paralyze them from acting”.(page 4) Fixing an employees underperformance is a lot easier and involve less risk than terminating or firing an employee. “Not only will you have an employee who is performing at an acceptable level; you will have an employee whose strengths and weaknesses you will know”. As an employee one should be willing and ready to motivate oneself in order to be successful in his or her career. (Shaer 4) There are some things to remember when counseling under performing employees and putting them on an effective performance. The specific things to keep in mind as a manager when you are counseling an underperforming employee: i. In counselling the manager should ensure that the “underperforming employees understand that their performance is considered below acceptable and that they are facing termination if they do not raise their performance to the level specified by the performance improvement plan”. (Shaer 20) ii. Also the counsellor must clearly explain the situation “so that employees understand what they need to do change their productivity, their output, or a personality trait; show leadership; or improve work quality”. (Shaer 21) iii. Furthermore you need to define measures of success and explain to the degree possible, “so that both you and the employee are in complete agreement about what needs to get done”. (Shaer 21) iv. On the other hand the employees need to have absolute clarity and agreement with management “so that they understand where they are, what need to change, and the specific ramifications for not achieving the necessary changes in performance, in the time frame you stipulate. You have to try your best to make sure they are not rationalizing away your comments about their performance”. (Shaer 21) v. The organization must be willing to provide moral support and guidance to the employees for them to be able to make these changes. “You need to assure employees that you are there to help them be successful”. (Shaer 21) vi. “The ninety-day performance improvement plan must be stated in very clear terms so that the decision whether to keep them or fire them comes down to a format like a checklist, for instance no tie scores, no exceeding one objective to make up for coming up short on another”. (Shaer 21) vii. “You need to make and follow a list of yes/no questions that all require “yes” answers or else the employee is out the door. This list must be very clear to the employee, and the measures must be as objective as possible”. (Shaer 21) viii. When discussing the role of perceptions and how your perceptions are the employee’s reality, the management needs to be open minded. “If the employee believes your perceptions are not valid, you should challenge him or her to change those perceptions”. (Shaer 21) According to Steven Shaer there are 3 ways underperforming employees rationalize their performance. This includes: 1. Outright denial of the situation. The employee denies the poor performance and puts the blame on the criteria used to measure his/her performance. (Shaer 16) 2. Denial by changing the norm.in rationalizing their performance an employee can easily deny the current performance measurement criteria used and instead cite another criteria currently used that he or she performs well in. (Shaer 16) 3. Denial by bias. In this case the employee believes that he /she is doing well in their career and certainly they are not under performing and therefore they end up blaming the employee or the measurer of the performance as being biased and therefore undermining them. (Shaer 16) 4. Bad luck. In the organization the employee claims that he or she is been assigned the hardest projects, or the worst clients, so they end up performing lower are than others since the measurer does not take into consideration the difficulty of the task assigned. (Shaer 17) The general lessons that Steve Shaer wants to understand with underperforming employees is that firing employees as presented in Chapter 5 can have great impact in the life of the employee as well as the organization. Firing an employee from an organization can create a gap in the employee’s position which brings about productivity issues in the organization. The firing process can also lead to legal tussle which can ruin the image of the organization. Absolute Binary Performance Plan, “a ninety-day performance plan for under performing employees that has only two outcomes: acceptable performance or termination”. To Fire or Fix an Employee; “the challenges on fixing employees’ performances versus termination of the underperforming employees. It is more efficient to transform an underperforming into satisfactorily performing employee than it is to fire them or even accept their level of underperformance”. Also “hiring and training a new employee is a lot more expensive and time consuming than counseling since it may take months to train a new employee and then you don’t know for sure if he or she will be a better performer than the employee you just fired”. The best way to apply the lessons from this book to our own performance as an employee is that we should ensure that our performance meets the set standards of the organization to avoid anxiety due to under performance at workplace and eventual termination. Also as an employee one should be willing and ready to motivate oneself in order to be successful in his or her career. There are valuable lessons which can be take from this book that will help the employee to perform at his or her job so that he or she do not need to be “Fixed" nor "Fired”. The greatest lesson acquired from the author is that an employee should try as much as possible not rationalizes their performance but instead they should accept if they are underperforming and seek counseling. Also an employee should know his or her own strengths and weakness as this can help him up his performances and improve on his career. Works cited Shaer, Steven. Fix Them or Fire Them: Managing, Evaluating and Terminating Underperforming Employees. Challenger Books, 2013. Print Read More