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Company Accidentally Fires Entire Staff Via Email
redletterdave writes with an amusing tale of missent email. From the article: "On Friday, more than 1,300 employees of London-based Aviva Investors walked into their offices, strolled over to their desks, booted up their computers and checked their emails, only to learn the shocking news: They would be leaving the company. The email ordered them to hand over company property and security passes before leaving the building, and left the staff with one final line: 'I would like to take this opportunity to thank you and wish you all the best for the future. 'This email was sent to Aviva's worldwide staff of 1,300 people, with bases in the U.S., UK, France, Spain, Sweden, Canada, Italy, Ireland, Germany, Norway, Poland, Switzerland, Belgium, Austria, Finland and the Netherlands. And it was all one giant mistake: The email was intended for only one individual."
It will now be two people leaving the company!
Those responsible should be sacked!
have the fucking balls to fire someone in person.
I am sure the employees were really happy when they heard that they weren't fired after all (well, except the guy who was fired).
And it was all one giant mistake
I think it's more like snafu than mistake
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
How many "How you really feel" comments went around during this time that people are going to now have to live with.
This should have happened to the United States Congress.
That's pretty cold to send a termination email and not bother including their name in the message.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Never hire an employee named "allstaff".
Their new email system will now redirect termination emails sent to all employees back to the sender.
If an employer said to me: "Congratulations! You haven't been fired."
(which is effectively what Aviva Investors has done)
I'd be relieved for a few moments before I started looking for a new job. A fuckup on this scale deserves employee desertion on the same scale.
Perhaps this will show (well, probably not), that firing someone by email is for fucking pussies. If you are a manager or supervisor have the Balls (or guts ladies) to say to my face that I'm fired and why. If you can't then you don't deserve your position.
as it stands the person who sent the email should be fired for being a) a fucking pussy b) a goddamned idiot who sent it to everyone and c) well make something up here.....
keep up. This is days old.
I bet they use exchange and the guys name was "Alli Staffa".
The person wasn't fired. It seems to be a typical "last day" e-mail given to anyone leaving voluntarily.
This is not the first time that Alan 'Call me Al' Staff has caused this problem.
Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!
Next time, have the balls (and decency) to look the guy in the eye when you fire him, and shit like this won't happen.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
Is anyone surprised considering the dweebs who tend to be in HR these days ?
seriously.
I imagine the person who sent the email will be getting their own personalized copy very soon.
Human Resource Departments: the single biggest brake on the World's economy. The reason for the lack of productivity, innovation and creativity in most large enterprises.
It's a job that nobody with a brain ever wanted to do. Actually, it's a job that nobody ever wanted to do. Nobody ever grows up wanting to work in HR. The only people who do work in HR, are those who have failed. And they bear a grudge.
Which explains why their inhumanity creates situations like this one, and so many similar situations. With the technology currently available, real managers can manage. HR staff need to be fired. All of them, everywhere. The world never really needed them in the first place, but there's no justification for having them now.
The first corporation that has the insight to fire all its HR people will wipe the floor with its competition within 5 years. They will have all the advantages of a small business, mixed with the power of a corporation. And they will have MUCH happier, more productive, employees.
I really did just change my name to Majordomo.
Have gnu, will travel.
Article doesn't say where the actual terminated individual resides, but I know that in some parts of the world, firing somebody via email could be construed as unnecessarily harsh, and end up putting the company squarely in line for a wrongful dismissal charge against them.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Ftfa ..
"An email which was intended for a member of staff who was leaving today was accidentally sent to all Aviva Investors staff worldwide," said Paul Lockstone, a spokesperson for Aviva.
Lockstone said that Aviva's quick actions to correct the issue ensured that no employees were truly offended.
"People were pretty quickly aware of the fact that this was a mistake," Lockstone said. "I don't believe any of our staff would have seen it really as anything other than the mistake that it was."
No employees truly offended? What planet is this man on?
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
The thing is, nowhere does it say that anyone was actually fired. The excerpts that are quoted don't say anything about dismissal, termination, firing, etc. All of the quoted things look like perfectly normal things that would be said to a person who was leaving the company voluntarily - don't forget your obligations, turn in company property, thanks for your service, best wishes, etc.
I know it's against SOP on /., but he/she was fired, he/she was just leaving the company that day. I'd complain about an incorrect summary, but how useful would that be.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Downsizing is SOO easy in the 21st century.
They did it for the lulz.
Were there also 1300 emails stating [RECALL] in attempt to hide their mistake?
I was an administrator for a medium size tech company in the early nineties, and we got this all the time. The problem was not with the technically inept, but with the engineers, who would commonly send emails with:
mail -s "some subject line text" user_name (left_arrow) textfile
This was the same company that had a homegrown script to delete a user from the system. (Not written, maintained or owned by my team, I hasten to say.) The script had inadequate error checking, and if an operator hit carriage return without entering a user name, the script would delete the entire home directory structure on several machines. It kept us busy.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
no HR does not = no driver or other checks.
It's the manager / team lead who should be doing the hiring / firing. And some HR stuff can be done by the back office or having HR not control hiring
This reminds me of the time my company decided that the annual bonus plan wasn't going to be given out that year, for some goofball reasons. Most teams were carefully maginalized to keep them from qualifying for bonus anyway, but there were some people left who had been counting on it.
And they knew about the open whole_company email distribution list address. It had no filters and nothing to block external emails.
So naturally, as soon as the bonus was cancelled, disposable email accounts popped up across the web and began firing a bitch barrage broadside into the open whole_company email distro list. Gripe after gripe went on for several hours in the middle of the night. Much fun was had by all who ready that stuff. Even the IT people enjoyed it even as they had to reluctantly block the address from further use.
We did get a new bonus plan after that, so perhaps the complaints worked. Shrug.
Management loves announcing bonus plans and performance incentives but hates hates hates paying them. It ends up not being much of an incentive if you know they're handing you five bucks they'd openly rather spend on a rope to wring your neck because the company didn't outdo Apple this year.
Sig for hire.
The directors of the firm hired to continue the credits after the other people had been sacked, wish it to be known that they have just been sacked.
It happened when I was in support. I couldn't clock in. A told the manager about it and she was like, "maybe you got fired". We both had a good laugh about it because we were all on good terms. No mass layoffs were expected, this was the go-go 90s. Next day--still can't clock in. Manager is more serious. "I'll have to look into this". Sure enough, somebody fat-fingered me off the payroll.
It was actually a good thing--I got paid for my accumulated vacation hours. They couldn't figure out how to charge them back to vacation. They "re-hired" me and I got money. The vacation hours started accumulating from zero; but I had just taken a few days so I didn't mind saving up again. The money came in handy.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
this must have been pretty upsetting for everybody who erroneously got the message (I have to wonder how many people actually got to the point of turning all their stuff in and walking out the door before the error was corrected..).
But the ultimate humility would be for that one person who was the intended recipient of that email. Because you know, the first thing that will happen is the news spreads around that it was all a big mistake, so that one person probably sighs in relief. And then shortly later that person finds out that they really were getting fired. Furthermore, probably everybody in the whole company will know who that person is now, where if he had been fired correctly the first time it probably would have been pretty low key and no big deal.
In fact I wouldn't be surprised if this one person could suffer from emotional damage as a result of all this.
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
Dom Portwood: So, uh, Milton has been let go?
Bob Slydell: Well, just a second there, professor. We, uh, we fixed the *glitch*. So he won't be receiving a paycheck anymore, so it'll just work itself out naturally.
Bob Porter: We always like to avoid confrontation, whenever possible. Problem is solved from your end.
My internetting is no good.
The person being fired was named "Alan Li" but unfortunately the email address was typed in as "ALL@" instead of "ALI@"
Whoops
Another possibility was that the sender was using the directory and the "allstaff" mailing list was just above or just below the one wanted. The sender could have clicked a bit off and selected the wrong address, not notice it and sent the email. It is not hard to do and is a rather simple mistake with no real consequences other than a few minutes uproar when people read their email.
By the way, as others have reported no one was fired by email. The email was sent to remind an employee that was already leaving what needed to be done on the last day of employment. Maybe people should read more than a summary before jumping to conclusions.
Is that a thing ?
"Haha! You're fired!"
*sadface*
"Oh, sorry, we sent that email to everyone by mistake."
- :D
"Whoops, never mind, you're the one employee we actually intended to fire."
- ...
The second snafu is when 500 of those people did a Reply-All saying "sod off wankers!"
What kind of company fires people by e-mail? Uh, low, disgusting & inhuman! If i were an employee there, I'd really try to find another job.
This is why I'd never hire Sam Alluser in the first place.
Revenue and profit per employee went through the roof, though!
I used to work for a different subsidiary of Aviva - it was long enough ago that I think I can speak fairly freely.
Like most huge companies (and Aviva are absolutely mahoosive - 1,300 people would make this just one small subsidiary), each division operates with varying degrees of independence - and varying degrees of competence.
My guess is that they meant to send this to somebody called Alison or Alex or something, but instead sent it to all@.... Usually you'd limit who can send to that particular mailing list, enforce some sort of filter to prevent email going out that hasn't been moderated and/or give it a slightly different (and harder to mix-up) alias.
so people would blame auto-completion of the email addresses
XDD
Average can mean any of median, mode, or mean (geometric, harmonic, arithmetic).
If you want to be precise and unambiguous, don't use the word.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
One advantage of the legal requirement in my country that you can only fire in writing (which means paper, e-mail doesn't legally count as "writing"). It's much less likely that you send out, say, 1300 termination letters, you know with post stamps and all, without noticing that something is wrong.
Sometimes, those regulations are quite useful.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
OK, he's banging my wife but:
I know he's doing it and
She can't complain about me banging my PA
And he'll do what he's told...all in all, a win/win situation.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
After all the employee's name was Ali Staf.
That's what they get for sending a termination email from an iPad.
The final line.... 'I would like to take this opportunity to thank you and wish you all the best for the future' ...seems to suggest that it wasn't supposed to be aimed at one person at all. Who would address a single person and say that?
imagine receiving that mail, realising *everyone* had received it, calming down, laughing and then watching a new email arrive addressed only to you
sag
When they rebranded Norwich Union, I always wondered how the marketing guys came up with Aviva.
... dunno ... what was the make of your first car? A Viva. Well, there you go.
How are we going to come up with a new name? uh
Just think, it could have been AnEscort, or AFiat.
Ousta la Aviva, baby.
a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.
... he would have gotten a big promotion for increasing shareholder value!
The perils of hiring (and needing to fire) a guy named Joe Allusers.
Gotta love the horrible mistakes that the little 'send all' button on Outlook causes.
In my last job, we got an email about once a month from the IT group telling us to never NEVER use that button. But, there was always t embarrassment. This however, is classic. It was done in a Tracy Hepburn movie once. Classic.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
Then followed it by "Let go celebrate our freedom!!" Because let face it if you work for a place that fire via Email you work at a shit place and secretly wish to get fired so you can get the hell out of your contract!
As a former Aviva employee who left to take up a new job last year and has seen their dismissal and resignation procedures in action (I suppose it's conceivable they might have changed since I left in September, but I seriously doubt it), I call shenanigans on this.
The company as a whole is so ridiculously risk-averse and keen on trying to present itself well that there is no way on Earth anyone would have been fired by email like that. Every time someone was lef go they were given the news in person by a line manager.
From reading the article, it sounds like the email that went out was actually a standard "Don't forget to return any company property" thing that goes out to someone who already knows that they are leaving. I have a very similar email from when I left.
'Cos its inhabitants spell HR wrong less often.