Why not hire an independent mediator? The key word here is “hire.” Either the employee has to pay part or all of the cost, or the mediator is paid by the company. In the first case, it places a significant economic burden on the employee; in the latter, the mediator has an incentive to find for the company to obtain more repeat business.

The mediator is absolutely working for the company. The whole point of this is to retain people who might still provide value to the company, with the idea that it's cheaper to retain an existing employee than to recruit and hire a new one. The process doesn't need to be "fair" from Amazon's perspective if it accomplishes this goal. The main goals for a mediator (again from Amazon's perspective) would be (a) to improve this process (retain more good employees, keep fewer bad ones) by bringing more objectivity and training to bear, and (b) mitigate potential PR downsides by reducing real and perceived conflicts of interest.

I do think a mediator could accomplish these goals. While the conflicts of interest might not be reduced to zero, it's likely that the pool of mediators will have more degrees of separation from the managers and therefore will reduce conflicts. (Whereas the normal employees that are on the jury have to consider the very real implications of their actions if they contradict what an important manager says.)

This kind of thing only works if you have an employment contract and the company is willing to accept that the manager can be wrong.

Meaningful investigations/mediations or tribunals tend to produce surprises, and tend to generate precedent.

There’s no way a company would subject itself to that scrutiny.

this sounds like it's ignoring political realities. if you find against the employee, they are gone; if you find for them, now there is a manager, maybe an important one, at your client who's pissed at you and might make noise about it to higher ups. better for business to do what the manager wants.

I'm not so sure. It sounds like in these cases the company feels it had the right to terminate but is willing to admit the bus might be wrong.

I think the mediators would actually have to show that they saved the jobs of some valuable employees from getting fired to get continued business.

If they have a 90+% company win rate then the experiment probably isn't productive.

> I like the idea of breaking off a boss/employee relationship that's not working and allowing the employee to find a different position in the company rather than just terminating the employee.

Yeah, there's two sides to it though. On one hand, its very, VERY common when an employee isn't performing that the problem is incompatible team/manager (it might be incompatible with the company, but often its a localized problem).

On the other hand, I've also worked at companies that -always- assumed the problem was the employee/team relationship, and critically incompetent employees would linger around and waste the time of several teams before they were canned, which was an obvious outcome to anyone who had worked with said employee. In one case of a company being way too nice, some dude I worked with took almost 2 years before being fired, when NO ONE wanted to work with him. Imagine how many things we could have done with the 150k+ a year he was paid during that whole ordeal...

> In one case of a company being way too nice, some dude I worked with took almost 2 years before being fired, when NO ONE wanted to work with him. Imagine how many things we could have done with the 150k+ a year he was paid during that whole ordeal...

Sure but you shouldn't consider the 150k+ on its own; you should compare it against all the goood employees who would've been fired in a different system that you ended up saving.

I like to think that it's better to keep one bad person than to fire good people for no reason but I admit that may be more an emotional stance than a logical one. And let me also say that by bad person I mean one who isn't technically able to do well, not one who is a jerk.

The bad employee does do untold damage though. They don't live in a vacuum. Good people quit over them (and not everyone is comfortable with blaming it on an individual, so management may not even know they're the reason). Workspace can become toxic. Rumors can start spreading making people not accept a job.

So you lose a lot of people by keeping a bad apple, too. In the example I gave above, at least 4-5 people I know for a fact quit over them before they were dealt with.

> Workspace can become toxic

Well this is why I tried to specify only keeping people who were performing poorly not because they were unpleasant to work with. Do people quit because they feel like their coworkers aren't smart or hard working enough?

All the time. The worse is at a high level people don't even realize it, because very quickly the entire workplace becomes "mediocre", and you don't even realize its lacking in "good people" from lack of reference points.

> Do people quit because they feel like their coworkers aren't smart or hard working enough?

Yes, especially if the not smart not hard working people get paid more than you do. Very demoralizing.

Yes same thing happened in my last employer with one troublesome engineer who was hard to deal with. When his manager left, none of the existing managers wanted to take him into their team. He was eventually kicked out when he verbally abused one the key technical leads.

Absolutely it can just be a case of being in the wrong place and having a shit for a hr manager. one particular nasty piece of work who used to work for a large uk company I worked for comes to mind.

I have tried to help some one in this situation but they did not get anyone else involved until its to late - other wise it could have been fixed.

In Germany we have a "Betriebsrat" (staff council?) for this.

It's elected by employees and can't be fired by the employer as long as elected. They are the opposite to the members of the board.

Don't know if something like that exists in the US.

Is there an equivalent in France? How does one who has a CDI appeal in court when he's facing a termination procedure?

In France the firing itself is a very strict procedure that includes a mandatory discussion between the parties. When an employer wants to fire an employee, here is what absolutly must happen for the procedure to be valid:

- The employer appoints a meeting, with a formal convocation. The meeting can only happen 5 days at least after this letter (has to be a signed letter)

- the employee can come to the meeting, and is often expected to, with a union representative. If there is no union representative in the company because of its size, the employer has to provide an official list of representative available for this purpose in the city.

- During the meeting, the employer explains all the issues. At this point, if the employer provides the slightest hint that the firing decision is already made, the procedure is not valid anymore.

- After the meeting the employer has to wait 2 days before they can notify the firing decision (or not). At this point, the employee has a termination period that can be between 1 and 3 months (often 3 months for developpers).

If at any point the procedure is not valid, the firing is effective anyway, but the employee can appeal to the Prudhommes court, a special court composed of employers and union representative. The employee can not be reinstated in their job, but can get some compensation money.

In France there is a "Labour court" (conseil de Prud'hommes) that handle disputes around employment contract, including termination of it. The court is independent of the company, it's a public institution. There is no jury, but four elected non-professional judges, two of them represent employers, the remaining two represent employees.

And if you're not happy with their decision, you can appeal to a higher administrative court, with professional judges.

that's the worker reps on the supervisory board is it not

I don't know.

I just know when people get fired, the "Betriebsrat" can save the.

That would be the union branch reps - works councils work at a higher level.

It is interesting how the default assumption is always that the employee is at fault. There's a reason why high quality employees always consider the specific manager when evaluating a job offer.

I understand why that presumption exists though, because blaming the manager is an obvious strategy for an underperforming employee to follow. Bonus points for alleging violating some protected status.