Think Customers: The 1to1 Blog

Tooling around the Internet (which is a "series of tubes," according to the once and potentially future Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens, who seems headed towards a federally-assisted layoff one way or another), I found no dearth of opinion and strategies for maintaining employee morale.

Chief among these is maintaining clear communications with employees. This doesn't mean gathering everyone for a rah-rah, we're-all-in-this-together session a day before you start cutting staff, but clearly delineating what the situation is and where it may be headed. Honesty is the best policy, as someone once said.

Empathy is of course paramount, but some suggest going beyond simply praising the person you're showing the door. (And be prepared for that deathless rejoinder, "I've already seen the door.") One site recommends sending letters to a former employee's family thanking them for the support of "their" family member during this tough time.

For the remaining employees, onsite counseling can help; many times, the non-laidoff end up more traumatized by a poorly handled job reduction than those who were actually reduced.

Moving forward, experts say that a realistic approach to the work at hand is crucial. You can't do the same -- or, needless to say, an increased -- volume and quality of work with 10 percent fewer people. Prioritizing customers and each employee's tasks can help streamline the workflow and send the message (to both those within and without the company) that you know what you're doing.

A related tip: develop forecasting and measurement tools that will warn you long before you need to do another layoff. Another round of reductions that follows the first one too closely can send employees the message that management doesn't know what it's doing.

"If you don't win, you're going to be fired," as baseball manager Leo Durocher once said. "If you do win, you've only put off the day you're going to be fired." I'd be curious to know how our readers have dealt with downsizing (not "right-sizing," please, unless you're a character from a 1995 Dilbert strip), and whether or not they agree with Leo the Lip.