For a while in the 90s Japanese companies had NODs for exactly the same reason Olsen gives: they didn't want to admit that they were firing people. The form varied, but typical examples would be an assignment to guard a tree or wait in a specified room for someone to give you work. The idea was to enforce isolation, boredom and loss of status to the point where the unfortunate employees would voluntarily quit; a kind of 9-5 solitary imprisonment.
Its actually a really brutal method of downsizing without paying redundancy money. Be careful what you wish for.
In Japan I think the phrase is called Window Gazing -- the employee / victim is provided an office with a nice view (presumably of things they could be doing instead of draining resources from the company) and left to draw their own conclusion.
In Australia many years ago -- early to mid 1990's -- we had a spate of large public organisations being privatised, with a predictably large number of HR casualties. There was typically a brief queueing system, as some token effort at redeployment was considered ... but in reality once you'd been side-moted to a Window Gazer role, you know precisely where you stood.
The phrase used locally was 'being led into / sitting around in Flight Deck' -- that being the name of the frequent flyer awards club of one of our two major airlines at the time. (That airline's completely gone now -- make of that what you will.)
Yes I've heard about it. It was even mentioned in "Silicon Valley" TV series. I guess it did the trick before internet era. Now you can be paid for looking at cute cat pictures whole day ;) Joking aside I was skeptical about this being a way to force someone to quit, but after some unbelievable boring projects I totally get this. You just cannot for longer time periods just play billiard, table football, browse HN.
It is brutal and in some countries, likely to result in a law suit as it can be construed as 'Constructive Dismissal'. Extraordinarily damaging to the person on the receiving end. Its better to do it the right way, make the position redundant, and enable everyone to move on.
This is known in Anglophone countries as "constructive dismissal", and is not a good idea if your area has anything resembling employee rights. It is treated as equivalent to firing someone, but will generally be taken as constituting malice by deliberate creation of a hostile work environment.
It seems that Konami is still at something similar: unwanted software developers are assigned to blue-collar jobs. http://www.giantbomb.com/articles/report-reveals-restrictive... The Giant Bomb article describes it as a punishment, but I assume that the main intention is to have the programmer take the hint and file his resignation.
Its actually a really brutal method of downsizing without paying redundancy money. Be careful what you wish for.