[suburban_strike]

It's not theater, it's defense against aggrievement. Termination is a traumatic event that threatens your ability to exist or provide for dependents. People [rightfully] don't handle exile well.

Someone with an interest in scuttling your company could just as easily maintain a low profile and do it at any time. Termination forces execution into a more-predictable timeframe. Once notified, the malevolent only have opportunity to exfiltrate or sabotage whatever they can reach in the time it takes to walk them out the door.

European laws require us to give people something like two months' notice. Even then we don't trust them; we pay them their salary and tell them to stay home.

[imtringued]

Ok but with the European laws the incentive to do something at the last minute doesn't really exist.

This seems like a self inflicted problem where the solution to the problem also made the problem worse when it happens.

If you know that you have X months of pay if you behave, then why misbehave? You'll lose out on money and get a criminal record. Meanwhile if the employer wants you gone it's free money. Everyone is happy.

You've been given enough time to find a new job. It's enough time to sit back and relax at work since you're getting paid either way.

The primary reason why people want to get revenge is because of how inhumane the entire process is.

The mass layoffs are random and impersonal, so you inherently think it is unfair and you will never agree with the reason of the layoff.

The immediate access block and security escort is a reaction and extension of the inhuame treatment.

[suburban_strike]

> with the European laws the incentive to do something at the last minute doesn't really exist.

Sibling comment correctly points out that misbehavior would follow a different termination path, but I don't actually know what it is since I've never seen a European employee successfully fired. We normally just lay off problem employees and follow the same offboarding procedure for everyone. This does present its own retroactive abuses of the PIP process.

> If you know that you have X months of pay if you behave, then why misbehave?

Ageism is real. For those expecting to retire from a company in Y years, seeing expected future income reduced to X months is catastrophic since there's no guarantee they will ever continue their career in any capacity yet expect to live beyond X months. The inhumanity comes from realizing how insignificant you were to the grand scheme of things, and how easily you are discarded and forgotten.

Only the younger crowd thinks the way you do, where there's always more time to find another job. They can afford to be rational. For the rest this will be the last job they ever have; it is an indignified and humiliating end to a career they spent decades building. Revenge is easily rationalized.

Employment is modern slavery. Few earn enough to have meaningful agency over their lives.

[repelsteeltje]

> European laws require us to give people something like two months' notice. Even then we don't trust them; we pay them their salary and tell them to stay home.

Escorting them to the door, and revoking access for the remainder of contract yet paying wages for that period seems very descent. Off course, you don't do that when the termination was triggered by employee's misbehaviour.

But, yeah - the point I was trying to make is that there is only so much you can do as an employer to protect the company while there's an infinite number of reasons for anyone to be traumatized or otherwise act erratic. Admins are always entrusted with huge power and while wariness is probably warranted, distrustfulness is IMO counterproductive and often harmful.