Today, Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz, 60, announced via email that she was fired over the phone.
“To all,
I am very sad to tell you that I’ve just been fired over the phone by Yahoo’s chairman of the board. It has been my pleasure to work with all of you and I wish you only the best going forward.”
Carol
Sent from my iPad
Bartz was hired in 2009 to much fanfare by Yahoo! as she was touted as the cleanup woman, the one person who could turn Yahoo! profits around and make the company a viable contender with Google.
For the most part, Yahoo! a Web company that is a behemoth when it comes to its assets and online traffic, was a solid brand and Bartz, who served as president and CEO for 14 years at the computer software firm, Autodesk, made sense.
Bartz did not deliver, by most accounts, and the company’s stock price hasn’t budged much since she came on board. Worse for Bartz, the company’s stock price enjoyed a bit of a rally when it was announced that she was canned.
It’s Yahoo!’s prerogative to do what needs to be done in order to turn their company around.
Still, what does it say about a company that fires its top exec via phone?
Firing an employee is a stressful thing to do, and for years, bosses have found resources to remove themselves from that awkward equation. In simpler times, an old-school boss would call the soon-to-be-terminated employee to her office and hand him a box and his last paycheck. Shortly thereafter, a burly security guard would escort the worker to the exit.
Larger companies would hire an outside consulting firm to objectively determine which employees were pulling their weight, and which employees were nothing but dead weight. The consultant would produce a list of redundant workers and may even conduct the exit interviews with the pink-slipped employees, to discuss possible job leads and the change in benefits.
Over time, the termination process has become a sanitized, Friday afternoon event that is designed to be prompt, discreet, and impersonal with the underlying message: “Your transition out of the company is just business — we thank you for your service, and we want you to do well in your future endeavors.”
In this sense, it seems that Yahoo!’s termination procedure became so impersonal that it’s disrespectful. What do you think, is it tacky to fire an employee via phone or is this just a techie-habit that employees had better get used to?
