Throughout my time at Tyson Foods I received excellent feedback from leadership and everyone I worked with. After months of making great accomplishments and progress, meeting deadlines, etc. my manager began to acting negatively toward me, communicating less with me as my time ended abruptly. One day, out of nowhere, I was invited to a meeting titled, "Action Plan," and it only included me, my manager and a team member from HR. At the time, I didn't think anything of it, until the meeting began. My manager began speaking allowed and stating that I was being put under a 30 day Action Plan due to "lack of collaboration." My reaction was a huge surprise, because up until that point, I was told I was doing everything great! My manager then assigned me to create a Brainshark video over the 5C's (which I completed) and told to put together a proposal for leadership (which I spent days working on and gathering information and also completed). After receiving positive feedback from my manager about how great I was doing, I had not heard anything else.
Fast forward, Tyson lays 500 employees off, thankfully I was unaffected, or so I thought. Then the COVID-19 pandemic sends the entire company working remote. One day, at random, I get a Zoom meeting invite from my manager and HR. As I feel fully confident going into this meeting that everything was going great and we were going to drop the Action Plan. My manager begins by stating that this will be my last day with Tyson and I am being terminated, I am in total disbelief (so is every single person I work with). I tried asking my manager why this was happening or what the reason was, he immediately LEFT the call without saying anything (real 5C material if you ask me). I tried asking HR the same question and why my manager left the call. She said, “well, we decided that we were going to go with performance issues as the reason,” without any details or reasoning.
Short story, my manager took my proposal, never even looked or commented on my Brainshark video (which I now realize was just busy work), fired me for no real reason and didn’t even have the courage to stay on the call.
I would consider taking the position back if I didn’t have to work for the same manager. Especially considering we are in the middle of a pandemic, my entire family is sick and my insurance was cut off on the day of my termination. My manager knew I had a family, he knew many of my family members were sick. The chances of securing a job during this time are little to none.
