Detecting when they want you gone
Employers know that terminating an employee, especially a long-term one, can be expensive.
The machinations they sometimes go through to try to avoid those costs are sometimes dreadful and often cruel. If the employer can provoke a resignation they get off scot-free. She who quits gets nothing. After 32 years of hearing stories from employees who are being “squeezed out,” common patterns emerge. The following are some of the signs that an employer is trying to get you to quit and save them money:
After many years of positive performance reviews, you suddenly get a negative one based on subjective observations you cannot nail down. The allegations are vague and often relate to attitude or team participation. Small mistakes are recorded and given focus. Sometimes no real explanation is given and your overall rating is simply dropped. This is most often the case when you have a new boss or your boss gets a new boss. Someone has decided you have reached your expiry date and they want you to feel the heat so you will get out of the kitchen.
You are above the age of 57 or so and are asked more than once throughout the course of a year when you plan to retire. Management couches it as part of their succession planning but the question is repeated. Always say you have no plans to retire. I have seen employers try to turn vague conversations about potential retirement plans into some sort of formal resignation that never happened.
You stop being invited to meetings and discussions in which you usually would be involved. Things are happening and decisions are being made and you are the last to find out. You are being progressively marginalized and excluded. When you ask why all you get is deflection and excuses.
The employer starts tinkering with your job description and taking away responsibilities. It is incremental at first but starts to become more obvious. Combined with that, or following it, you are assigned to a new role. It may not be a drop down in the organizational chart but it is less prestigious than the one you had.
There is significant case law indicating that if a demotion or change in job responsibilities becomes so drastic that it is humiliating a constructive dismissal may have occurred. That means you can take the position that you have effectively been terminated without the words having been said or written. You should always talk to an employment lawyer before you walk out the door because if your assessment is wrong you could end up with nothing, including no employment insurance. Sometimes the opposite occurs. There is no change to your responsibilities or position but the work keeps getting piled on. Vacant positions that supported you are not filled. The employer exerts more and more pressure for you to achieve more. This happens to people whom the employer knows are sufficiently anxious that they cannot stand the thought of not getting their assigned tasks done. The employer runs you ragged hoping you will start looking for work elsewhere.
Most employers are smart enough not to drop your wages significantly, more than 10 to 15 per cent, as they know it could give you the right to walk out the door and sue for wrongful dismissal. Employers do, however, deny you participation in the yearly bonus without any substantive reason, refuse to give you a raise or even marginally drop your income. Their hope is that, again, you become sufficiently annoyed to start your job search.
I have often counselled employees who have been victims of one or more of the above tactics to try to let go of their anxiety and wait to get fired. It is much easier to negotiate a severance package if there is a clear termination rather than having to argue whether there was a constructive dismissal. I will tell them to be frank with their employer and tell them that if this behaviour is designed to provoke a resignation it will not work and that if they want to terminate you they should simply do it. Sometimes that will let the employer know that the jig is up and they are going to have to write a cheque.
Whatever you do, do not quit in a moment of frustration. If all else fails go home sick and call an employment lawyer. We have a saying: “never quit, wait to get fired, you get more.”
This article was originally published by The Hamilton Spectator.
