Worker’s Job Suffered During An Unimaginable Family Tragedy, But Management Ultimately Let Him Go
Canva
Grief does not obey company timelines, especially after a sudden tragedy changes a young employee’s entire life.
One promising salesperson returned from bereavement leave only weeks after losing both parents in a car crash.
Instead of receiving time, coaching, or a performance plan, his temporary struggle triggered a severe management response.
Let’s see why Reddit found this decision indefensible.
AITA For Firing An Employee After His Parents Passed?
I’m the VP of Sales at a software company and one of our sales development reps parents passed away at the beginning of April, sadly they were involved in a car crash and both lost their lives.
Now the employee in question in 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.
So, a very young guy with what sounds like a pretty demanding sales job has experienced a huge tragedy.
…what comes next?
Because of the accident we let him take a 1 month paid leave of absence from work and he’s returned a few weeks ago and his performance is severely lacking.
He’s super unmotivated, not cold calling, not reaching to prospects for the last 2-3 weeks enough since he’s come back.
Our whole mgmt 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 can’t just wait that long.
As you can imagine, that didn’t go over well.
We called him into a meeting on Friday afternoon and gave him the bad news, he was very calm and rude about it.
Told us to go **** ourselves and got up and went to his desk grabbed his few things and left.
I thought this was very very unprofessional and extremely rude.
I told my boyfriend about all of this and he said myself and my mgmt team are a bunch of [jerks] and pricks with no hearts.
AITA?
Let’s get some analysis from the comments:
Just out of the blue like that?
Boy, you were in a rush.
Sign up to get our BEST stories of the week straight to your inbox.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee who was fired because of a coworkers lies, only to get the chance for revenge years later.
Is this even for real?
Management fired the previously excellent employee after only two or three difficult weeks back, without first warning him, coaching him, or offering a performance plan.
Reddit overwhelmingly judged OP the AH, while OP later admitted the decision was cruel and offered to connect him with a recruiter.
Management demolished his remaining stability, then acted shocked when he forgot to thank them for the unexpected professional development opportunity.
I’ve heard of heartless, but this one takes the cake and the whole bakery.
Enjoyed this story?
Sign up to get our BEST stories of the week straight to your inbox.
