What happened at my work was they did like 2 mini layoffs, then a medium one, then a big one that was split into 3 parts, all this over the course of about two years. Morale here is more or less in free fall, we’ve alienated our user base, and I don’t expect it to recover for many years.
wow, it sounds like they did the exact perfectly wrong approach to layoffs. (When I was laid off I researched how companies do them).
The goal should be to do one big layoff - once. This sounds horrible, but it actually helps morale in the longrun because you can tell your people you did it once so it doesn’t have to happen again. (Assuming the company is in fact in dire straits). Morale will go to zero, some employees will leave, but it will rebuild, and trust will (eventually) be restored.
What you don’t want to do is several layoffs, because each succeeding layoff morale drops even lower and more and more people leave voluntarily, and you never rebuild that trust, because there is no reason to. Anxiety that you’ll lose your job keeps growing, fearing that you’ll be next, and you have no idea when. So, you might as well just let everyone go and start over.
Yeah only reason I’m still there is I can’t let my insurance get disrupted right now. Couple more months though then I’m going to start looking around. I don’t trust them at all anymore and I’ve pretty well checked out of that job
What happened at my work was they did like 2 mini layoffs, then a medium one, then a big one that was split into 3 parts, all this over the course of about two years. Morale here is more or less in free fall, we’ve alienated our user base, and I don’t expect it to recover for many years.
wow, it sounds like they did the exact perfectly wrong approach to layoffs. (When I was laid off I researched how companies do them).
The goal should be to do one big layoff - once. This sounds horrible, but it actually helps morale in the longrun because you can tell your people you did it once so it doesn’t have to happen again. (Assuming the company is in fact in dire straits). Morale will go to zero, some employees will leave, but it will rebuild, and trust will (eventually) be restored.
What you don’t want to do is several layoffs, because each succeeding layoff morale drops even lower and more and more people leave voluntarily, and you never rebuild that trust, because there is no reason to. Anxiety that you’ll lose your job keeps growing, fearing that you’ll be next, and you have no idea when. So, you might as well just let everyone go and start over.
Yeah only reason I’m still there is I can’t let my insurance get disrupted right now. Couple more months though then I’m going to start looking around. I don’t trust them at all anymore and I’ve pretty well checked out of that job