Those CEOs seem to have the opposite impression from what I've seen "on the ground":
- Layoffs do a far better job of destroying morale and filling employees with fear for their own jobs than any sort of at-cause termination. Layoffs should also be filling shareholders with fear for the soundness of their investments, but apparently "profit line go up" is all that matters.
- Not-tiny corporations are perfectly happy to terminate even adequate employees (let alone "underperforming but not a total disaster"). They have a much easier time replacing workers than smaller businesses do; their obstacles come less from an unwillingness to terminate and more from an aversion to risk - namely, risk of a wrongful termination claim, which they mitigate through formalities like performance reviews and PIPs.
In short, by the time layoffs are on the table, a large company has likely already culled whatever it considers "dead weight". Businesses would also vastly prefer terminations to be for-cause rather than a formal layoff for the simple reason that firing someone typically makes it easier to wriggle out of being on the hook for unemployment than laying someone off.
Comments
Those CEOs seem to have the opposite impression from what I've seen "on the ground":
- Layoffs do a far better job of destroying morale and filling employees with fear for their own jobs than any sort of at-cause termination. Layoffs should also be filling shareholders with fear for the soundness of their investments, but apparently "profit line go up" is all that matters.
- Not-tiny corporations are perfectly happy to terminate even adequate employees (let alone "underperforming but not a total disaster"). They have a much easier time replacing workers than smaller businesses do; their obstacles come less from an unwillingness to terminate and more from an aversion to risk - namely, risk of a wrongful termination claim, which they mitigate through formalities like performance reviews and PIPs.
In short, by the time layoffs are on the table, a large company has likely already culled whatever it considers "dead weight". Businesses would also vastly prefer terminations to be for-cause rather than a formal layoff for the simple reason that firing someone typically makes it easier to wriggle out of being on the hook for unemployment than laying someone off.