I’ve been an employer for over 20 years now and I’ve employed probably 100 people in that time. Probably 20 of those were longer term employees and the rest were seasonal help. I didn’t have much interaction with the seasonal employees so for the sake of this post let’s say I have 18 former employees that I spent a significant amount of time working with.
Of those 18 I would say two of them might think somewhat positively about me and the rest probably actively dislike me if not worse. Of the two that don’t hate me I think the big thing is that one left on his own and the other I let go rather than have a long dragged out process of transfiring. Transfiring is when instead of firing someone you have them do something else that they didn’t sign up for because you don’t want to fire them.
The thing about a small business is that things change radically. Our business went from warehousing inventory and all that came with it to mostly allowing our vendors to ship directly to our customers. We went from having a website that we were responsible for and working with various hosting companies to using shopify. We went in the reverse on the software that runs our business in that we built our own software that did many of the tasks that needed to be done exactly how we’d want them done instead of massaging a pre-built software to get the job done.
It’s only natural that shifting the business as much as we have over the course of decades that employees would have to come and go to keep up with the business. I think if I had made it clear what was happening and graciously eased the employees out who needed to go the employees wouldn’t hate me. But that’s not what I did. I tried to cajole people to become what they weren’t meant to be and then fired them for “their failure” to be that.
Looking back on things it is much easier to see the shifts as independent shifts. While you are in the middle of a shift it doesn’t necessarily seem as obvious. It’s just the next thing that has to be done and there’s no clear demarcation. But that’s my fault for just trudging along and not being intentional enough about the way I operate.