A useless employee not being fired does not only breed resentment in coworkers, it also erodes trust in management: Other employees will lose their trust that leadership is willing to follow through with hard decisions for the good of the company (speaking from personal experience).
Management being capricious is basically "news at 11", but management being perceived as hesitant/incompetent can be MUCH worse EVEN from the PoV of an employee (=> because that indicates the company has no future)!
It sounds to me like the effects on the rest of the team has already set in. That is, anyone reasonable would already have questions about management / leadership.
Making the change now:
- won't save the situation
- it might, as others have mention actually undermine any trust the rest of the team has left
- invite legal action on the part of the dismissed employee.
All that aside, giving the rogue employee the benefit of the doubt, it feels like it might be health / mental health related issue. Random time off being the tell.
Sucks for the team. But dismissing someone who needs help is a tough call.
Every day a poor performer gets the same salary as you is morale-destroying.
There's no perfect solution to this problem.
10 employees doing the work and wondering "why is this guy getting paid the same as me?" hurts the company too.
Every action has downsides. Every day they're still there demotivates others, possibly making them look for "better" jobs, since clearly their own can be done by a slacker.
But every firing, even of someone clearly underperforming, will cause a bit of fear in even the best performer.
The perfect solution is to let them vest then terminate.
Agree that slackers ruin morale though. Currently going through this at my place. It’s especially difficult when merely being on the same team as slackers makes the external opinion of everyone on that team horrible. Some might know the better members but on average the reputation can be stained.
How do you mean that it is "the perfect solution" if the action has negative morale implications for every other employee?
I'll go with your opinion being that it may be the best solution, but perfect it is not.
The mere fact that I don't even think it's the best solution means that there may very well be employees here who also don't, which means it's not perfect.
There will be employees who will hear "this fired person's stock was taken out of your end of year bonus". Because it kinda was. Especially at a small company where one employee-month plus their stock can be a significant portion of company yearly profits.
They should have changed stuff up well before this point. If you want to question someone’s vestment then do that at least a year before that date and get serious about demanding results from the problematic employee at that point. That way they’ve got 3-6 months to perform and you’ve got time to terminate for lack of performance.
Doing it when the vestment date comes up just reeks of shortsightedness to the point of vindictiveness. Immaturity.
If it’s like the person quit but kept coming to work for the last month before vestment then talk to them and maybe offer to buy them out if they’ve got no good explanations.
>Every day a poor performer gets the same salary as you is morale-destroying.
not really? if he is unjustly compensated more than he is worth it's kind of funny, but unless you're a child you shouldn't really care about it. this is way different than if you were compensated less than what you are worth.
There will be employees who will hear "this fired person's stock was taken out of your end of year bonus". Because it kinda was. Especially at a small company where one employee-month plus their stock can be a significant portion of company yearly profits.
As I pointed out in another comment that you replied to (though I'm not sure you read it properly, since I've already made this point and did not seem to incorporate it into your reply), while comp is not a zero sum game, it also isn't entirely not a zero sum game.
One poor-performing employee isn't worth the risk of destroying the morale and trust of all the others.