Top Tips for Bosses: Sack Staff During the Fire Drill

December 17, 2008

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If you’re going to make staff redundant, especially just before Christmas, you might think that sweetening the blow is a good idea. After all, not only would doing so be courteous, not to say merciful, it might also be strategic, for in this funny old world, you never know what will happen. Today’s sacked associate might be tomorrow’s CEO, himself capable of wielding the axe or bestowing employment.

But some people don’t hold this view. In fact, given the following true story, it would appear that some head honchos believe that ruthlessness, pure and simple, is the way to go. This happened, in the City, last Friday.

The scene: The boardroom in a well-known bank in the City of London. Its executives have decided that a cull is required. However, they fear that once the staff know they’ve lost their jobs, they might pilfer top secret information before they can be ejected from the building.

Boss in black suit: I have a cunning plan to stop our ungrateful soon-to-be-unemployed staff from stealing confidential information.

Boss in grey suit: You think we should serve injunctions on them at the same time as we sack them?

Boss in black suit: Don’t be stupid – we can’t afford the lawyers.

Boss in pink suit: I agree. By the way, are we sacking our in-house lawyers too?

Boss in black suit: No, we need someone to deal with the inevitable claims we’ll get and we can’t afford to instruct anyone. We’ll have to make do with them but when things settle down we can get rid of one or two.

Boss in grey suit: That’s not important right now. What’s your plan?

There is a pause as the boss in a black suit eyes his comrades. There is a flicker of a smile on the corners of his lips.

Boss in a black suit, conspiratorially: You know the fire drill?

Other bosses, as one: Yes.

Boss in a black suit: There’s one due this Friday.

Other bosses, exasperated: What’s that got to do with getting rid of everyone on the fifth floor?

Boss in a black suit: I’ll tell you! Let’s hold the annual super-duper fire drill, the one you’re not allowed to ignore, which says that everyone has to congregate outside the office. Once everyone is there, we’ll make them redundant. That way, we can tell the security guards who are still left not to allow anyone back in the office, and the ungrateful staff won’t be able to steal any top secret information.

Boss in a white suit: Or Post-It Notes – in my experience, people who are made redundant always steal Post-It Notes.

Boss in a pink suit: And Bic biros.

Boss in a grey suit: Not to mention staplers.

Boss in a black suit: Exactly! That’s their mentality. If they’re prepared to steal the stationary, who knows what else they might steal! My plan will stop them in their tracks.

Boss in a grey suit: It is very cunning, but what if someone ignores the fire alarm and stays inside?

Boss in a black suit: I’ve thought of that. We’ll get the in-house lawyers to sack them for failure to observe company protocol.

All bosses, in unison: Brilliant. Let’s do it!

A day later in the City of London. A fire alarm has sounded in a well-known bank. Its staff have all duly left the building and congregated at the designated meeting place.  They are musing that at least the fire drill gave them something to do, when the boss in a black suit arrives.

Boss in black suit, to all staff: You’re fired. Happy Christmas.

Photo of axe apparently wielded by bosses in the City courtesy of Craftsman1. Axed staff said they would rather the axeman was benign, as captured below by Cayusa, and even went so far as to offer to take most – if not all – of their clothes off to get their jobs back. City bosses ignored their pleas and refused to comment, other than to confirm that they had awarded themselves annual bonuses of £795,687.13 each and pledged £3.17 to the London fire brigade’s Christmas appeal. 

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One Response to “Top Tips for Bosses: Sack Staff During the Fire Drill”

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Ways to beat the credit crunch: take a pay cut to save a colleague : Spada Professional Services PR Firm on December 19, 2008 at 10:06 am

[...] our friends in the City could have suggested likewise before using to fire drill to cull their [...]

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Good work by Rusbridger

February 10, 2012
scissors

The headline says it all: ‘Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger takes pay cut‘.

Dan Sabbagh’s piece says a bit more: said editor ‘emailed staff at the newspaper to say that his salary in the upcoming 2012-13 financial year will be £395,010, compared with £438,900 in the current financial year’.

Some voices say: ‘How worthy.’

Others opine: ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’

But we say: good work by Mr Rusbridger. For the sake of the media’s survival, we hope that others in senior positions in the industry will follow suit.

Image of toolkit allegedly deployed by Alan Rusbridger courtesy of Flickr user LollyKnit.

From the inside of the maze, ethically outwards

February 9, 2012

Curious times in the media; strange days at The Times.

Would ‘Dacre Cards‘ – the system of licensing journalists proposed by Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre – have prevented the embarrassment now palpable at the Times over the NightJack story?

Times editor James Harding’s evidence to the Leveson Inquiry seemed heartfelt and contrite, albeit that the paper’s former long-serving and much-respected lawyer, Alastair Brett, seems to have been, er, rather dropped in it. Clearly, mistakes were made with regard to NightJack by young reporter Patrick Foster who, once he had hacked into NightJack’s account and thus discovered his identity, then embarked on a quest to expose it via legitimate methods. This, as Inquiry counsel Robert Jay QC put it, was “rather like working from the inside of the maze out”.

But had Foster been licensed via a Dacre Card, would this unsavoury episode in the Times’s history have been avoided?

We suspect not. A raft of laws were in existence at precisely the time when many News of the World journalists seemed to believe that they were entitled to hack any phone they liked. Those laws forbade them from doing so, and yet made no difference. Aside from the obvious objection to them – that they will squeeze out freelancers and citizen journalists – Dacre Cards would simply amount to something to circumvent.

What is really required is an ethical shake-up, from top to bottom. Society generally – not just journalists – needs a sense that some things are just plain wrong.

Supreme Court on Twitter

February 6, 2012

Something remarkable happened today. Yes, the Supreme Court launched its Twitter feed. It even has a Twitter policy, one of caveats, disclaimers and little by way of illumination but regardless: who would have thought that the successor body to the House of Lords would stoop to engage with the world of tweets, hashtags and retweets?

We look forward to the day when court business will be conducted via Twitter. Meantime, check out this link for an excellent blog on the Supreme Court.