A survey by Hudson Recruitment in the UK found that British business chiefs want to dismiss an annual quota of underperforming staff, but fear doing so in the current employment market. The findings reveal that 61 per cent of senior UK bosses believe that a fixed target for annual staff dismissal is healthy.

Low-performance, low-potential employees are said to make up one tenth of a company’s workforce. Although shedding staff in a climate where companies are desperate to find talent is counterintuitive, nevertheless, retaining for the sake of retaining damages both the long-term health of a company and the career progression of the individual.

British business leaders acknowledged that there were distinct advantages to deliberately releasing average or below-average performers. Ensuring strong team members do not carry weaker ones was cited as the main advantage (60 per cent) of deliberately releasing average or below average performers. Allowing underperforming staff to pursue a fresh challenge more suited to their abilities (50 per cent), bottom-line improvement (36 per cent), ensuring that training is spent on those that will really benefit (35 per cent) and increasing productivity (33 per cent) also rated highly. But the risks inherent to this strategy were highlighted by the 75 per cent of respondents who cited ‘introducing a culture of fear’ as a deterrent to a dismissal quota. 61 per cent felt pursuing such a dismissal policy would lower morale within the workplace. In general, women seem to feel more strongly about the disadvantages than men. Women are almost 10 per cent more likely to think that deliberately releasing staff lowers morale (68 per cent vs 59 per cent) and just over 10 per cent are more likely to think that it decreases the motivation of the workforce (48 per cent vs 37 per cent).

Hudson’s research, the first of its kind to examine the business taboo of ‘culling’ within the context of business performance, highlights that the majority of UK bosses see the financial benefits of dismissing underperforming employees and admit that the advantages of such a dismissal policy clearly outweigh the disadvantages. Retaining for the sake of retaining will not help solve either the UK’s skills crisis or its increasing productivity gap. In addition, this retention is not good for a company’s long-term health or the career progression of the individual. However, legitimate concerns remain about both the implications of a dismissal target and the extent to which simply having hands on deck - regardless of the ability of those hands – is, in the current climate, better than having insufficient resources.