Vice president fires employee grieving his parents but regrets their decision immediately

It is crucial to take or give someone enough time to grieve after losing a loved one. It is a despairing moment for anyone, especially someone who works and eventually has to report back to the office. In such sad scenarios, it is also ideal for companies to take an understanding approach. A software company's Vice President (VP) of Sales, u/Resident_Occasion, shared a post on Reddit where they shared how they had to let go of an employee after his parents passed away in a car accident. 

The post has gone viral with 40,000 upvotes and 3.4,000 comments on the platform. One of the VP's sales development representatives lost his parents in a tragic car crash, and they gave him a month off to deal with the news. The VP wrote, "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."

According to the VP, the youngster had a high-paying job for someone who was a new graduate and made about $90K in commission. Therefore, the company expected a lot of performance from him. After his parents passed away, the company decided to give him a month of paid leave but found out that he was still not performing to the best of his abilities after he returned.

The VP shared, "He's super unmotivated, not cold calling, reaching to prospects for the last 2-3 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 can't just wait that long." So, they decided to call him into a meeting and let him know that he was fired. The employee was naturally very frustrated but eventually left after he made a bit of a scene at the office. The VP thought that his reaction was "unprofessional and extremely rude."

The VP felt uneasy with the entire situation and told their boyfriend about it, where the partner pointed out that it was insensitive to fire the employee. The VP turned to people on the internet to know if they had been wrong to fire the worker. People sided with the employee in the comment section. u/HardBoiledLibrary commented, "There were better options than just straight up firing him. Maybe have a meeting about his job performance? See if he needs counseling. This dude is clearly in the depths of despair. Firing him was immature." 

u/Safetytheflamewolf said, "It is clear that he is suffering from depression over the loss of his parents, and instead of talking to him about it, you guys decided to just outright fire him. That was NOT something he needed at all." Another individual, u/Advnchur, highlighted, "Like, I wish there was a classification much worse than that in this subreddit because it would be you and your company. Of course, the guy isn’t going to perform to his previous standard. He just lost his parents!" After receiving many responses, mainly negative, the VP realized their mistake and reached out to the employee, asking how he was doing. Also, the VP offered the employee another job opportunity.