This past week, for the first time in my professional life, I was involved directly with firing someone. My one employee under me overnight in the warehouse had been making constant mistakes, learning nothing, and getting steadily slower and lazier over the past few weeks.
The warehouse supervisor, who had never actually met the employee in question, had been pushing to fire him for a few weeks because of a few bad mistakes. My direct supervisor on nights and I had tried to defend him, claiming it was all training issues. This was true, all his mistakes could be traced to the fact that we have a shity training program, and I was trying to correct everything. I even tried to motivate the employee with a "show them they're wrong to give up on you" mentality.
He learned nothing. He would work as slow as possible, claiming he was just "being careful" but he was really just taking extremely long bathroom breaks and wandering around.
He wasn't allowed to use a forklift, because he had crashed it into a column earlier, so I had to do about a third of his orders anyway. Of course he would wait until the end of the shift to tell me what he needed me to do, so it was always rushed.
We caught him asleep a couple times. Turns out he had a second job, which he claimed was just part time. Later we found he was working another 40 hour job, meaning he was getting almost no sleep at home, and really shouldn't have been anywhere near a manufacturing facility.
Finally, last week, the warehouse had nothing. Holidays had slowed us down, so we had no orders. I told him to help out another section that actually had a ton to do. He spent eight hours standing around with his hands in his pockets.
That was the last straw for my supervisor, and I agreed. I had to go call the employee into the office and help escort him out.
Almost put this in Rrraaagghhh because even though it really needed to be done...I still felt horrible about it.
Topic: Completely Random Thoughts (Read 1929982 times)
