10 Simple Ways to Get an Employee to Quit

If you have someone you want to get rid of, but you are too wimpy to fire him, there are some things you can do to make him miserable enough to start looking for a new job, just to get the heck out of Dodge.

Here are 10 of them:
1. Lower pay.
It’s perfectly legal (as long as there’s no contract involved) to lower pay if you announce it in advance (and in writing, in some jurisdictions). So, you can say, “Starting next month, you’ll be making $10,000 less per year!” but not, “Oh, by the way, your paycheck is smaller today because I cut your pay.”
2. Dock an exempt employee’s PTO for everything.
Your employee has a sick kid and wants to work from home? Charge it to his PTO bank. What about a one-hour dentist appointment? PTO dock. Coming in 15 minutes late? You betcha. Now, if an employee is exempt, you can’t dock actual pay, but as long as his pay remains the same, you can dock PTO.

To keep reading, click here: 10 Simply Ways to Get an Employee to Quit

Related Posts

21 thoughts on “10 Simple Ways to Get an Employee to Quit

  1. Did someone contact you about my former boss? Because except for lowering pay and friending me on FB, she did ALL of these things. Is it any wonder that her dept has had 80% turnover in less than 2 years? It is shocking that upper management doesn’t say anything because it is a good company – she is just a terror.

  2. Also – for future reference – what should salaried employees do when their PTO has been docked to death? We were forced to take LWOP and our pay was docked. Aside from going to work somewhere else, does an employee have options?

    1. Well it depends why it’s being docked. If it’s being docked because they’re late or leaving early the simple answer is to stick to your assigned schedule.

      1. Docked for everything. Coming in late, leaving early, long lunch, etc yet there wasn’t any comp time given or extra compensation when we worked 45+ hour weeks.

        1. Unfortunately, you’ve got to recognize that your employer doesn’t care about the employees. I’d carefully consider how much you like this job otherwise.

          If your manager is a rational person, I’d have a chat. “I’m really bothered that my PTO is docked if I take a long lunch, but if I put in extra time, I receive no benefit.”

  3. If you do intentionally practice any of these to drive a particular employee out the door then a huge caution is in order. This was done in my company to a hugely underperforming employee and drove the target of these activities straight to a lawyer. There were protected class allegations and the suit was quietly settled for an undisclosed sum of money in exchange for silence. This backfired big time on the company.

    1. Reality, everyone is in a protected class these days. If you’re just targeting one person it can get you in big trouble legally.

      But, the reality is, some managers do all of these things to their entire staff! No law violation, just bad management.

  4. Who, I think it’s a bit cheeky – like, these are the 10 habits of highly (in)effective managers. I don’t think EHRO is advocating for all these.

    1. The commenters at Inc think I’m advocating for them. “This is unprofessional!” I’m like, dude, did you read the whole thing?

  5. Old job did 6 of those 10; and the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back was when after putting in 55-60 hours every week they docked my PTO for half a day when I arrived 2 hours late one day (it was a planned late arrival for a doctor’s appt.). Hence the reason I refer to them as “old job.”

    When I mentioned to my manager that this bothered me I was told that it was “policy” and there was nothing she could do about it.

    Clearly they didn’t care about employees and never will. That is the reason that the project I was involved in had a 30% turnover rate within an 18 month period; including key positions such as the Project Manager.

  6. This gave me a good chuckle. Sadly though, I’ve seen all of these things done at one time or another in companies that weren’t trying to make people quit, just plain old bad management.

  7. On one occasion and in one sitting I gave an employee a bad review (justified and documented), a zero percent salary increase, and formally put the employee on probation. Within a few months I had an opening for a new employee.

  8. This post is so in sync with your blog name 🙂

    I especially loved the 3rd point. I have applied it a zillion times and every time, it works like a charm.

  9. This article made me laugh. Then I saw some people seem to think you’re seriously suggesting managers do the things on the list. Then I laughed some more. In a very unprofessional way.

    1. I got the most amusing email about how I was the cause of bullying at work and blah, blah, blah. I just wrote back, “Did you read the whole thing? This piece was satire.”

      No response of course.

      To be fair, I didn’t bold the ending, and if you’ve never read my writing before you wouldn’t know that I constantly rail against all of those managerial behaviors, so while i am amused, I do understand the misunderstanding.

      1. Btw, I just noticed this and I’m not sure if you’re as crazy about typos as me, but I noticed in your link you’ve written: “To keep reading, click here: 10 Simply Ways to Get an Employee to Quit” (it says ‘simply’ instead of ‘simple’).

        And even as I note this, I will note along with it that I honestly think simple/simply is one of the most common typos I myself make as my fingers just bloody want to type ‘simply’. I do the same with probable vs probably.

  10. I completely understand the point of this post, but it actually gave me anxiety reading it. I remember those days of my boss playing favorites, micromanaging, and, of course, being scrutinized for things I didn’t control.Seriously, that was a bad time in my life. I’m not a sissy person but abuse like this can really destroy a worker for a long time afterward.

  11. Corollary to #10 – change the job dramatically to something the employee would never have gotten an interview for if it was a posted job.

    “We know you were hired as a technical writer, but now we want you to be a Perl programmer.Oh, you say that’s not what you were hired to do? We’ll rewrite your job description. Not what you do? That’s insubordination!”

Comments are closed.

Are you looking for a new HR job? Or are you trying to hire a new HR person? Either way, hop on over to Evil HR Jobs, and you'll find what you're looking for.