I work at a German company, currently, and have been dealing with someone which - IMO - should be fired. I can understand what you say about not resorting immediately to drastic measures, and my company is actually trying (too hard, again IMO) to do that.<p>However, you have to consider the downsides of this: is it fair that my workload is increased, because someone is underperforming? I&#x27;m not talking about occasional spikes, this is systematic. What does the company communicate to its associates, when &quot;accepting&quot; someone like this? What about quality, how am I supposed to champion quality if the company accepts the low quality output (let&#x27;s forget &quot;low quantity&quot; for a moment) from someone else?<p>There&#x27;s always a downside, and the workplace is an open system. You can&#x27;t just &quot;target&quot; the low-performer, everything you do will target everyone on the team. If you try to &quot;reconciliation&quot; measures (other roles, extra training, coaching, easing of tasks), you&#x27;re implicitly communicating something to the other team members. If you do it repeatedly and long enough, you&#x27;ll eventually get: a) frustration, resentment and feelings of unfairness in other associates; and b) diminishing commitment and quality standards (i.e. &quot;why should I care for quality if it is not demanded from others?&quot;).<p>P.S. I also feel a kind of shock every time I hear&#x2F;read someone talking &quot;lightheartedly&quot; about firing someone. I&#x27;m just trying to highlight the potential downside of &quot;not firing&quot;.