Doing everything you can to help the terminated employees (as mentioned in my post, Steps for Conducting a Respectful, Professional Downsizing) goes a long way in ensuring employees know that you care about them.
But what about the survivors?
It is especially important for you to reassure the survivors because they’re watching how you’re treating the folks who are leaving and they’re likely thinking, “Ok, is this how I’m going to be treated if this happens to me if we have further layoffs?”
Make sure those surviving employees are perceiving a sense of fairness and humanity being given to the people who are being let go. It promotes trust and faith in management and the organization’s future.
Here’s how to ensure your surviving employees feel less uncertainty about the future:
- Make Sure Your Management Is Visible—You want to make sure your senior management is visible for the surviving employees. They shouldn’t be off in London or on vacation or hiding in the closet when this is all happening.
They need to be visible. They need to be accessible. They need to be part of the communication process. They need to be having meetings before and after the layoff and communicating clearly.
- Communication is So Important—You can’t over communicate during a downsizing, but the communication does need to be open, honest and two-way. Supervisors and managers need to be willing to listen to survivors’ concerns and be empathetic.
- Give Time for Grieving—Allow for a period of grieving. These folks have lost their friends and they’re uncertain about their own future.
The organization is going to recover a lot more quickly if managers and employees are allowed to vent their frustrations and ask questions.
Also, explain why downsizing was necessary because if you don’t, they’re going to make up reasons, and rumors are going to abound.
- Don’t Make Promises You Can’t Keep—The surviving employees will likely get back to business as usual after everything is said and done, however, you do have to be careful about not over-promising. You don’t want to make statements that you can’t really make in good faith, like, “We’re never going to have another layoff, this is it, the last one.”
You don’t know what the future’s going to bring, so you can’t make that kind of promise.
- Get the Survivors into Their New Positions—Employees are going to want to know how the work’s going to get done now, so engage them in a process improvement discussion.
Total Quality Improvement
In order to get everything situated and put the rest of your employees into their new positions, you need to figure out:
- What needs to be done
- Who has the best skills to be able to get it done
- Who has the time to get it done
- Who has the talent to get it done
It’s also a good idea to explore ideas for ways that productivity and efficiency can be increased because you have fewer people to do it now.
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