Running Out of Time
I’m the VP of Sales at a software company, and one of our sales development rep’s parents passed at the beginning of April. Sadly they were involved in a car crash and both lost their lives. Now, the employee in question is a very young, 22-year-old guy and has been with us for about 10 months now.
He’s a great employee and we were thinking about promotions in the next ~6 months for him. His job is a high-paying one for a new grad, about ~90k with commission and base, so we expect a lot from this position. Because of the accident, we let him take a one-month paid leave of absence from work.
It took a heartbreaking twist. He’s returned a few weeks ago and his performance is severely lacking. He’s super unmotivated, not cold calling, not reaching out to prospects for the last two-three weeks enough since he’s come back.
Our whole management team has noticed this and we decided to let him go because we feel like he’d need months and months to be able to produce again and we just can’t wait that long. We called him into a meeting on Friday afternoon and gave him the bad news.
He was very calm and very rude about it. Told us to go screw ourselves, got up and went to his desk, grabbed his few things, and left.
I thought this was very unprofessional and again, extremely rude. I told my boyfriend about all of this and he said we are the jerks with no hearts. Story credit: Reddit / Resident_Occasion