Never Fire Anyone

Problem: Firing employees reduces morale.

Context: A small organization wants its employees to feel safe.

Forces:

Firing employees means admitting we made the wrong hire or used BadHiringPractices
We are FraidyCats and fired employees might fight back.
Managers don't have the social skills to fire employees.
Managers have personal (perhaps sexual) relationships with some fraction of workers.
It's too much work to fire an employee (because, as above, we are FraidyCats) and so it's easier to put up with the situation instead of taking action.

Solution: Low-performing workers are never let go. They are moved into places where they can do little harm and KeepPeopleGainfullyEmployed. (Workers might be fired for malfeasance or insubordination, such as embezzling from the company or telling the boss to fsck off; but workers are not fired solely for performance reasons.)

Resulting Context: Your competent programmers become disgruntled that they are getting paid only marginally more than the worthless programmers. Your really good programmers are frustrated because they spend time fixing the damage of the WarmBodies. Your middle managers and TechnicalLeads become angry that they have to manage people they cannot fire, and dream of effecting ParkingLotTherapy upon them.

Once the dead weight realizes "my managers don't think TheyCanFireMe" all hope is lost.

Respite will only come when shrinking budgets hold a gun to the manager's head and some people are finally LaidOff. Hopefully, your CowOrkers don't belong to the same DungeonsAndDragons group as your manager.

Rationale: Only mean managers fire people. There are no bad workers, only workers who aren't being managed properly.

Related: TerminationQuota, KeepPeopleGainfullyEmployed, WarningSignsOfCorporateDoom, HiringPatterns. (Do we need a FiringPatterns??)