The Art of Laying People Off
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PUNCHLINE: (yes, I'll start with it) Managing Partners: I don't think you should downsize now unless you absolutely have to. It's a rough world out there - you should have cut the underperformers a long time ago. BUT, if you HAVE TO, if you MUST, then learn from one of the most successful and business savvy people out there, Guy Kawasaki - read The Art of Laying People Off
Excerpts to tempt you:
6 Share the pain. When people around you are losing their jobs, you can share the pain, too. Cut your pay. In fact, the higher the employee, the bigger the percentage of pay reduction. Take a smaller office. Turn in the company car. Reassign your personal assistant to a revenue-generating position. Fly coach. Stay in motels. Sell the boxseat tickets to the ball game. Give your 30-inch flat-panel display to a programmer who could use it to debug faster. Do something, however symbolic.
8 Don’t ask for pity. Sometimes managers go to great lengths to show the person they’re laying off (or firing) how hard it is on them. Th is reminds me of the old definition of chutzpah: A boy murders his parents and then asks the court for leniency because he’s an orphan. The person who suffers is the one being terminated, not the manager.
The research indicates that the MANNER in which people are laid off is the determining factor in whether they are likely to file suit for some type of job-related tort, including but not only wrongful termination. The psychologists say that our "memories" are made in the present. The researches say that when people are treated with disrespect at lay-off, their re-evaluate their employment history from an aggrieved point of view. Anyone can do a thought experiment by imagining a heartless lay-off and a thoughtful one and then surveying the entire employment relationship. Bad days, small slights, and unkind comments will become more prominent in your recollected experience from the point of view of a disrespectful, harsh or thoughtless lay-off. Suit often follows. When I mediate the rare employment case (it's not my primary area of expertise) I find it useful to bring balance back to the employee's recollected experience on the job and accountability and apology valuable to the employer in settling suit. The best conflict resolution, however, is prevention and employers could do themselves a favor by being mindful of their employees' circumstances at a time when termination becomes a necessity.
Another big consideration during termination/lay-off --- don't do it on a Friday afternoon. That leaves people "stewing" all weekend to the point where they are often imobilized (and/or drunk) by Monday. Wednesday is the weekly cut-off for unemployment applications in most states. By executing the termination on Monday or Tuesday, the party has the opportunity to be immediately pro-active. Filing for unemployment and seeking assistance with finding new employment, creates a more positive mindset. New jobs are often found more quickly and the entire experience is less traumatic.
As always, direct and pragmatic advice from Gerry, but I would add a caveat from my observation of UK and a few international law firms right now in these tricky times: ensure before you act you have the right communications in place. Candour and transparency are essential as well as Kawsaki's recommended empathy. In my experience of working with more than 50 law firms of all sizes and types, it is relatively rare, still, for firms making tough choices in hard times to think through properly how to communicate really well just what they are doing and why to their critical audiences and to work out the order in which those communications are issued. It's still far too commonplace for people working in law firms to learn about downsizings by reading about it in the Lawyer. Never lose sight of the importance of valuing and being respectful of your people, whether leaving or staying and the need to tell them candidly what is happening and not to allow yourselves to be driven by a media agenda.