| I have been laid off twice. I have also witnessed a lot of layoffs. Bad: Supervisor comes to your office and asks you to come with them. You know you are being laid off, because everyone knows they are doing layoffs.
You go to your bosses boss’ office and they tell you. They give you a bunch of paperwork. They escort you out, and you schedule a date to come back and get your stuff. Good: They announce there are going to be layoffs. They justify it as a need to ‘fill in kind justification’. Explain the process and procedure.
Line up an employment specialist(s), from outside the company. They will provide resume writing help, job search help, financial counseling, and possible family counseling. When you tell people, you give them a month or two to hand over their work and get their resumes out there, while they are still employed. IMHO being unemployed and looking for a job costs you between 15 and 30 percent of your salary. Provide a pseudo office where they can go to work on job hunting. Typically away from the work site. When I was laid off by Siemens they did all of these good things. Although prior lay offs they did not. But I am grateful to them for how they handled it when it was my turn. Extra bonus good: Before the end date, organize the people into small groups (3 to 6). These groups have to be people that can care about each other’s success. Have them meet every other day to discuss how they are doing at finding another job. At the groups, the people need to set goals. Establish limits (e.g. I will not take a job that pays less than abc). Define plans. Set the date when you need to revisit this and possibly change your plans / limits / goals. This date should be no more than 3 months. Your group’s objective is to share success, support each other, and hold accountable for achieving plans. It is easy to make the group meeting just a BS session. Need to make it formal with everyone asking about each other. It is easy to lose focus and wallow in self-pity and anger. When someone gets a job, celebrate it. We did steak and eggs breakfast. Super bonus good: Set up a company, that employs everyone at a ¼ time as consultants to the job they used to have. This provides then the ability to retain their salary. But might negatively impact unemployment. |