Layoffs don't just layoff lowest performers, they often layoff departments that the company doesn't find necessary anymore. High performers are laid off all the time.
That’s not necessarily the case, especially at smaller companies.
A friend of mine leads a department of ~20 people at a midsize company (~1000 employees). They were told late one afternoon that the company was announcing a 10% layoff the following day, that they needed to reduce their departmental payroll accordingly, and to submit a list of employees to lay off by next morning, using performance as the primary criterion for whom to cut. This was feasible and fair, since a manager of 20 people can know exactly how well each of them is performing. (In fact, the employees my friend ended up dismissing were ones they’d wanted to get rid of for a while, but didn’t quite meet the stringent criteria for PIPing, so it was actually a relief to be able to let them go.)
At bigger companies, layoffs cannot get decided with such granularity (decisions come from several levels above managers familiar with each and every employee being laid off), so individual performance is a much smaller factor.
That's not always true. Some layoffs cut entire organizational units regardless of individual performance. Others cut a certain percentage across the board (sometimes with exceptions for strategic growth areas). The CEO might tell every manager to cut 10%, and obviously they're going to take that chance to eliminate their worst performers.
I agree with you in general, but wanted to point out that layoffs are often related to the companies overall performance and direction. So it's not uncommon for layoffs to have very little correlation with the performance of any individual affected employee.
Large scale lay offs are generally done blind to avoid accusations of bias: they don’t lay off low performers, they use some other fixed criteria (like laying off teams, people under X tenure, etc…).
Performance based layoffs have to be well documented and take lots of time, so they just happen continuously but in small numbers. At least, that is how it seems to me.
The issue with layoffs is that it's not just the low performers being fired. Typically managers are given a preference or salary amount that has to be cut. Inevitably the low performers are the first to be out on the list, but often times they'll also cut some of the high projects because they're making too much money. This even assumes that it's the managers making the decisions. If not, what happens is that layoffs are random message by someone outside the department and you can get stuck with low performers
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