My office was a buzz this morning with the news, around 50 people were laid off. All day long people discussed it. Information was shared on the layoff. People were questioning who was let go. Words of sympathy were spoken for the unemployed individuals. It was all pretty typical behavior for such an event. The catch is that this layoff did not occur in my company.
The company that performed the “downsizing” was an agency that provides very similar services to ours. We’re like the mom and pop bookstore and they’re Borders. Sometimes we do business together. A lot of their employees come to our company and sometimes our employees leave for their company. Some of our employees work for both. Although they are somewhat of competition, news of the layoff sent shock waves through our business.
The news was sudden for the affected employees and the most guidance they were given was to apply at our agency or another similar company. Yet, no one from their company not the V.P. or HR called us to discuss openings we might have. As one of my employees noted, “it could have been handled in a much better fashion.” Through the day the resumes came in, but I only have 2 positions in their field.
On the HR side you might think this is good for my business. It certainly gives us a bigger candidate pool. Yet, the inability to place these individuals only creates more guilt for agencies like ourselves. Not to mention the nose dive morale took in our company. Humans are empathetic creatures and it is difficult to see our fellow man struggle.
A layoff is like an earthquake. The epicenter receives the most damage, but the outlying areas are affected as well.
May 15, 2008 at 5:12 pm |
I’d love to hear comments from someone who has participated in a thoughtfully executed layoff. I try to have my ducks in a row — and I’m pretty good because I’ve layed off thousands of people (not an understatement) — but I always missed something. My biggest ‘miss’ was laying off a woman who’s husband was deployed to Iraq a few days before the announcement. Who knew? It’s not like the deployment changes anything, except that I might have found a way to share the news a little differently. I now ask my managers about major red flags in the employee population before my management teams are allowed to initiate a layoff.
May 15, 2008 at 5:30 pm |
Laurie – I have yet to do a layoff…ah it feels good to be an HR newbie. I’m not looking forward to it. I like the idea about asking managers for red flags. Although everyone needs support, it’s good to know who might need extra attention.
May 16, 2008 at 12:41 pm |
Been there, done that. Been on the receiving end of far too many layoff notices to get worked up about it. There is no such thing as a thoughtfully executed layoff. The human impact is far too great to make it anything less than devastating on everyone.
Ask anyone who was in Southern California during the late 80s and early 90s to describe what mass layoffs did to Los Angeles.
Morale throughout the region suffered terribly. You had people who lost homes they’d been in for 20 years. Divorce rates soared. Crime increased. And then there was the phenomenon of the former Senior VP who was now working at McDonald’s, because his unemployment had run out and some money coming in beat the heck out of none.
No, a far better way was how HP handled it in the early 70s. Everyone took ever other Friday off without pay. Managers took every Friday off without pay. Those who were slated to be cut were routed to other jobs, so they could keep their benefits.
May 17, 2008 at 2:20 pm |
[...] was interesting to read Rachel’s blog on the recent news of layoffs at a company that does business with her own organization. No one [...]
May 21, 2008 at 6:40 pm |
jrandom42 – Unfortunately that isn’t always an option for companies. Sometimes it comes down to doing what’s best for the remaining employees or hurting everyone by shutting down completely.
May 30, 2008 at 12:23 pm |
True, companies need to look out for their own interests, but things can snowball rapidly. What happened in Southern California is an object lesson. In October of 1988, Northrup laid off 2,000 people. Rockewell’s Rocketdyne division laid off 10,000. TRW laid off 5,000. Litton Industries laid off 3,500. United Technologies laid off 1,500. General Dynamic/Convair laid off 11,000. Lockheed announced it was closing its Burbank headquarters and all its California operations, laying off 25,000. Hughes Aerospace laid off 6,000. And on Halloween Friday, some 40,000 McDonnell Douglas employees got pink slips with their final pay checks. That’s over 100,000 people dumped out in less than a month. These were the best and the brightest who designed and built the ‘Arsenal of Democracy” as well as much of the space program and had just been dumped like yesterday’s trash. And for every one of them let go, another 5-12 jobs disappeared in related industries or in other areas that relied on that income.
Southern California didn’t really recover till about 3 years ago, and is now dipping back down because of the housing bubble.
It got so bad, that when Packard Bell advertised 50 open support positions, they got over 25,000 resumes and 4,000 direct applicants. I was in that line and left when I discovered the guy in front of me was a former Senior Software Engineer with Hughes Satellite Systems and the guy behind me was the project manager for McDonnell Douglas’s F-15 fire control computer systems. If these guys were so desperate that they were directly applying to a 3rd rate computer manufacturer, how could I compete?
No, there’s no graceful way to conduct a layoff, and no way to avoid the personal and communal devastation.