Day 27: Procedure

Today was a difficult day at work but also highlighted the absurdities that “protective” laws can lead to.  I had to go to London to fire 2 employees. 

The first one was let go under a redundancy programme (in short the company is not doing well and so we have to reduce certain positions), the legal process requires the company to go through a number of consultation meetings before actually making the person redundant.  This was the second meeting and after asking her if she agreed to have a “without prejudice” conversation we were able to rapidly agree on an amicable parting of ways. Her only question was: Why did you not offer me this at our first meeting 2 weeks ago?

The second was more dramatic.  A consultant got himself into dire financial straights complicated by a difficult family situation.  The emotional and financial stress led him to using the company credit card for his personal expenses to the point where he had a debt of close to £10,000 on top of all his other debts to banks and credit firms.  The company warned him and tried to give him some time to pay off the credit card but his predicament was not resolvable in the short term. So the company decided to call him into a disciplinary hearing (which I had to do since I am Managing Director of Europe). The problem is that as the facts were clear and recognised there was no other possibility than to find him guilty of gross misconduct which meant that he would be fired with immediate effect and with no compensation.  During the meeting he did not dispute the facts he just asked if he could have some time (6 weeks) to finish the project he was working on and hopefully find another job. However, because the problem was a gross misconduct and procedures are quite inflexible we had no latitude to give him more time (even though it would have been in our project’s best interest). The worst thing is that he would have been much better off if he had resigned a week ago, which he could have been told to do unofficially but nobody knew enough or cared enough to do so.  So the “machine” of rules and procedures which are there to protect people end up crushing this particular individual.

How do you protect individuals and at the same time allow for the fact that every case is different ? I can imagine that issues like this and worse come up everyday in judicial courts. Maybe laws should be indicative rather than absolute?  And most importantly sentencing should only be limited in its severity not in its humanity.