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Tag: hiring and firing

  • No-Fire Season Is Real—Here’s Why Smart Companies Observe It

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    It’s officially no-fire season — that is, unless someone commits an egregious act— you don’t terminate employees from the week before Thanksgiving until January.

    That’s the rule from employment attorney Todd Stanton, and it’s a good one. (In the interest of full disclosure, I wrote the forward to Stanton’s book, The 95% Rule: A Field Guide to Not Losing Your Mind or Making Your Lawyer Rich.)

    What’s the reason behind this rule? You may think that it’s just to be nice —nobody wants to lose their job around the holidays. And this is true. It is nice not to terminate people around the holidays. But it’s also arm of protection for your company.

    Stanton wrote on LinkedIn:

    As we learn in The 95% Rule and Employment Law Axiom No. 22, “Surprised people get angry. Angry people sue.” So at Stanton Law, LLC, we treat the week before Thanksgiving through the end of December as No Fire Season. Absent critical safety violations or severe rule infractions, employers considering terminations in this six-week spot should really ask themselves if timing is right to show someone the door. If you’ve put up with poor performance for as long as you have, gritting your teeth for another few weeks to let people get through the holidays may help you avoid getting coal (or a demand letter) in your stocking.

    The cost of a lawsuit

    Most lawsuit threats go nowhere, but any time a lawyer accepts a case from your terminated employee (no matter how ridiculous), it will cost you to respond. You hear a lot about companies settling without admitting guilt. They do this because, even when innocent, it’s often far cheaper to settle. Attorney Matthew Joseph Novian writes:

    “On average, it costs employers around $75,000 to work with an employment lawyer to settle a claim before it reaches trial. However, if the case progresses to court, the expenses can skyrocket, with pre-trial defense costs easily exceeding $125,000.”

    Note, these costs don’t include the amount you have to pay out to the employee. And you’ll still be out the money if you go to court and win. You can see why companies will settle a claim for $50,000 rather than go to court.

    So, of course, you want to avoid lawsuits — even ones you’ll win.

    Why people sue

    Not everyone who is wronged will sue. In fact, the EEOC estimates that up to 90 percent of people whose rights have been violated at work will not sue. Most people will let it go and move on.

    So what makes the difference between someone who lets it go and someone who hires an attorney? Well, as Stanton said, they are angry.

    In medical malpractice cases, the power of the apology has been so profound that several states have “apology laws.” This prevents patients from using a physician’s apology for a mistake in a lawsuit. It encourages doctors to apologize, and it doesn’t increase lawsuits. It’s a win-win. People often just want to know.

    Likewise, people don’t want to be embarrassed. From Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day, people are often with friends and family, and questions about jobs will naturally come up. Having your mother-in-law ask how work is going at the job that just fired you forces you to either confess over the turkey that you got fired or lie. Neither is good.

    And not to mention the financial pressure. It’s not that things are magically affordable come January; it’s that people tend to have extra year-end expenses. And having to tell kids that Santa isn’t coming because Daddy lost his job just adds to the anger.

    Often, companies slow down hiring in the fourth quarter as well, so it’s even more difficult to find a job.

    The more frustrated and angry a terminated employee is, the more likely they are to pick up a phone and call an attorney. Your i’s may be dotted and your t’s crossed, but if they can make a convincing case to the lawyer, you’ll still be on the hook for a few thousand for your attorney to pull together the information and speak with the plaintiff’s attorney.

    What about people who really need to go?

    Of course, Stanton’s rule doesn’t mean you never fire during this time. If someone is embezzling, sending naughty pictures on the company email, or punches a customer, you will terminate them, even if it’s Christmas Eve. 

    But for your standard employee who is struggling with a performance improvement plan, you can continue to work with them. If your financial straits mean you have no option but to let them go between now and January, Stanton adds:

    “If you are going to hand out pink slips with holiday cards, make sure to keep the process as considerate and generous as you can. You’re not rewarding the person you’re letting go, you’re protecting the folks you’re keeping.”

    You want to treat everyone with dignity. The employees who stay behind will see how you’ve treated their colleagues who lost their jobs. Remember that.

    Also, if you let people go for any reason other than gross misconduct and then show up to the company holiday party in your new six-figure sports car, your remaining employees will relay that information to the person you just laid off for “unavoidable cost reasons.” And their lawyer sees you as a deep-pocketed target.

    Not terminating during the holiday season is the nice thing to do, but even if you’re not a nice person, it’s the financially prudent thing to do. Follow Stanton’s advice and put a moratorium on almost all terminations. 

    The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

    The final deadline for the 2026 Inc. Regionals Awards is Friday, December 12, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply now.

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    Suzanne Lucas

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  • How to Get Workers and Employers on the Same Page About Salary Negotiations

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    Workers negotiating their pay with their employer is always a sensitive topic. It’s tricky because it goes beyond raw dollar figures, touching on emotions, employee engagement and bottom line financial considerations. The results of a new study might prompt you to rethink some of the ways you hire new talent, and maybe even tweak your annual review processes.

    The data, from research led by Harvard, Brown and University of California Los Angeles, came from over 3,000 job seekers looking for roles in the technology sector. Some survey participants were “encouraged” to negotiate their salaries with employers, with phrases like “companies expect you to negotiate,” while a separate group was offered an alternative discounted coaching option to help boost salary discussion skills, HRDive explains. 

    The results are startling: among the people who were encouraged to discuss different salaries (and who then landed job offers inside a few months) 61 percent of people actually proposed a different salary level to their initial offer. This led to an average increase in pay of over 12 percent, equating to roughly $27,000 extra annually.

    But among the group who were offered merely a discount on a coaching class, very few people took up the offer… and among the 3 percent who did there was “no meaningful effect” on their interest or confidence in negotiating salaries.

    People participating in the study were still early in their careers, aged 31 on average, and they were paid around $220,000 a year on average — a figure that places them significantly higher than the U.S. average, which is about $75,000 annually according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics.

    At this point you may be thinking that this means the data won’t reflect onto the larger labor market, where non-tech jobs dominate and the average worker is making only a third of the salary of the survey respondents. But where the tech world goes, other industries tend to follow. Plus, as HRDive notes, the study’s results surprised experts in the field. The researchers polled 117 academics and asked them to predict the experiment’s outcome: most predicted the coaching option would be more effective.

    What’s actually happening here is that the workers aren’t pushing for higher compensation because they feel like their employers simply won’t be open to the idea of a negotiation — not because they don’t feel like they have the right interpersonal skills to carry out the negotiation. If the latter were true, then the coaching option may have proven more popular. The fact that the encouragement technique worked simply suggests that people were wary of negotiating salaries, until it was pointed out to them that it was “normal.”

    What’s the takeaway for your company?

    Salary negotiation provides several indirect benefits beyond the obvious financial benefits to workers who successfully boost their earnings. First, if you’re seeking a new job and you handle these negotiations properly, it can signal that you’re a serious worker with confidence about your own skills — something that could boost your reputation with managers in the long term. 

    Second, being open to salary negotiation could contribute to your image as a good employer, among your current staff (possibly boosting your retention power) as much as incoming talent. A recent report suggests this may count more than ever when it comes to attracting top rank workers, with much more focus on a company’s reputation than before. 

    Another thing to be aware of as an employer is that AI hiring tools, which some people use to help them navigate the process of applying for jobs, are sometimes advising women and people of color to ask for lower salaries than for white men. It might be worth checking your HR processes to make sure your salary negotiations are fair and equitable.

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    Kit Eaton

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