Work It Podcast: Are you at risk of being quietly fired?

If your boss is not giving you clear development targets or excluding you from key meetings, you may be at risk of being quietly fired. How should you respond?

Peter Hamilton, vice president and managing director (APAC) at KellyOCG, delves into the tactics employers use and offers crucial advice on how to protect your career.

Here's an excerpt from the podcast: 

Tiffany Ang:
Let's get into the definition of quiet firing, and why do companies do quiet firing? 

Peter Hamilton:
It may be that some organisations systematically think of it as a way to manage poor performing employees, but I would suspect it's more individual managers acting in a way because they don't know better, or perhaps because they want to manage somebody out of the organisation, and they think that's the best way of doing it.

What we do know is that if you're on the receiving end of that, (it) doesn't feel very nice. You probably feel undervalued.

You probably feel confused as to whether I am doing a good job or not, and that can lead to some poor outcomes on people's mental health and dent their confidence.  

Gerald Tan: 
From what I see and what I hear, some companies do think about it, maybe on a systemic level, because they are trying to avoid their legal obligations. 

They redesignate their titles, ship them to new portfolios, which are poor fits, and then hopefully they will quit slowly one by one.

And the stories that I've heard are that these people who (are) affected see their colleagues going through that same experience, and they kind of know that the time is up. Four of my colleagues have left, and I'm the only one left, and maybe it's the writing on the wall and I need to leave soon. 
 
Tiffany:
Why don't companies just say, "Look, you can't perform and then so therefore, please move out"? Why do they make this whole process so long drawn? 

Peter:
Some organisations, the sort of activities you've both described, are where they're going for a more formal process of rebadging somebody or changing their designation. And there's no doubt that there are some of the outcomes of that, and they want to reduce the workforce, and not all of those people can be redeployed.

In those regards, that's a more interventionalist approach. 

I think we know that employees want good upfront communication. They want to know how they're performing. The employer owes you the obligation to tell you how you're performing, and if you're not performing, how to close that gap. It's this gray area where you're not necessarily knowing how you're performing, and you have the potential to misinterpret how you're being treated. That's bad for morale, it's bad for the team.

What we know is that people like to work in organisations where they're treated equitably, and you see the people across the organisation, no matter how you are performing, are being treated fairly as well, because everybody knows that that could be you in the future.