Chins Up!
A day hardly passes without news of significant layoffs at some financial, publishing, or automaking concern, which set me to wondering how companies can maintain employee morale in such a climate. There seems to be no end of advice out there.
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.
Related Entries
- Prepare for Impact: Conquering the Terror of Losing Your Job
- Chins Up!
- Protect Your Brand During Layoffs
Kevin, way to hit the nail on the head. There is a lot of difficulty taking those rah-rah words seriously when the layoffs come the next day. "Just do the right thing for the customer and your employees" I believe are the exact words usually used in this situation yet there is so much in those words that can get lost in translation. I guess from one man's perspective doing the right thing can still mean showing you the door.
Oh. Yes. "Softening the blow of redundancy".
This is, of course, "great" for the folks left behind by this tranche of redundancies. I watched this in the early nineties when I had what proved to be the mixed fortune of working for Wang Laboratories.
The first round of redundancies (layoff does sound so much nicer, but you still get to not be able to pay your bills!) had security guards leading the unfortunate first swathe from the premises.
That first swathe were the folk that "everyone hated anyway", so they never mattered to anyone left behind. Yeah, right!
The next swathe was done a little kinder, then the next, then the next. By the time they got to me I was sitting in the VP of HR's office while he finished a phone call and then told me I was finished, too.
And all the empathy in the world did not make that last recession any easier.
A few years ago I watched Gartner make people redundant. The announcement came round that the redundancies had finished. A sigh of relief went up and the tension eased. Then a colleague was called to the management suite and made redundant. That worked well. She was more upset than anyone could possibly imagine.
Fancy words and fancy letters to the family (give me strength!) mean nothing. The only thing that softens the blow is hard cash. And that is pretty much the only thing that softens it for the folk left in employment in the organisation, too - the hope that, when you get your appointment for summary execution, you get as good a payoff as the last round did.
The real advice for the current time is "Do not own shares in your employer, because you lose your savings as well as your job when it goes belly up!"
You're absolutely right Kevin. Clear direction of the responsibilities and careful leadership for the remaining employees is also important during layoffs.