If someone you know well was fired what would you say to them? Did they do something wrong? Did they get severance? Do they have a new job in hand? Would they need some financial help (if you are the generous kind or if they already don’t owe you money)?

Will you ever ask if they were treated well during the process? Often, we are interested in the material transaction rather than humane actions. The firms we work for are no different. They too are keen on completing the transaction of termination, more than anything else.

When we want to ‘fire’ somebody, once you get past the obvious question of why, you need to spend more time on the how. This ‘how’ is unfortunately more skewed towards the organisation rather than the employees involved. Let me tell you why.

In my early days of managerial training one of the modules was about termination. We were put through a series of role-plays on how to fire people for issues relating to discipline, integrity, performance, sexual harassment and so on. There was a separate process and technique to master in each situation. I learnt it was important to ensure the employee resigns rather than be seen as fired. That way, we could be safe from legal implications. Thereafter every time we were faced with any of these situations warranting a separation we would always be thinking about how to get the employee to resign. Our bosses and HR would be only keen to know we got the resignation in writing. Not much has changed since then.

A decade or so later I was faced with the prospect of laying off 40-odd people. Though we were a large organisation, the skills were not transferable and we couldn’t transfer them to another department. I was principally against firing, but I was new to the organisation. It wasn’t performance, it wasn’t the fault of these employees, it was a global directive we had to follow as the strategy had changed.

Business, Finance, Legal and HR guys came together for a hastily convened meeting and this is what we discussed:

Who will lead the communication with the affected employees? What would be the content of the message?

What was the total compensation of the employees being made redundant?

What would be the timeline by which we should complete the separation?

What would we convey to the rest of the organisation about this exercise?

Do any of the employees facing the axe have a legal background, or do they have relatives who are lawyers or are they connected to any bureaucrats or politicians? Would we face adverse publicity?

Could we set up a daily reporting format? Who will send the progress report to our global bosses?

As you can see, there was nothing at all in this discussion about “how will we help the employees who are going through this separation”.

You can’t blame the team discussing this situation. We all are wired to think of protecting the organisation’s interest, as that’s how we are trained in leadership and other functional roles. I am yet to come across any orientation module called ‘Separation with Empathy’. Firing on behalf of the organisation itself is a pretty stressful job, so thinking about our colleagues who are going through this obviously comes next or last unless any of those affected is an affectionate colleague, friend or relative.

The challenge for people who are in influential roles in organisations is to spend more time on the “how” of separation. Can we at a professional and organisation level support and counsel the people who must go through this separation?

The only time we will start to think differently perhaps is when the affected party is us. I hope all of us get fired at least once in our career for us to behave with empathy when we reach the top of the totem pole!

(The author is a prolific commentator on workplace dynamics. He was till recently the Managing Director of Kelly Services & Kelly OCG India and is now pursuing his entrepreneurial dreams.)

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