"I'm sorry, we're going to have to let you go." The Marketing of Redundancy.

I'm a regular reader of the 1to1 blog.  It's a great place to find articles on current marketing and CRM stuff.  But imagine my surprise when I saw an article called Chins Up! What an ironic title!

Yes, it's about the current financial crisis, and it's about how to be a good uncle in the workplace.  Look, click the link and read it.  It starts off:

A day hardly passes without news of significant layoffs at some financial, publishing, or automaking concern, which set me to wondering how companies can maintain employee morale in such a climate. There seems to be no end of advice out there.

That's good.  There is.  There's a shed load of advice.  But some of the things the article distills are bizarre:

For the remaining employees, onsite counseling can help; many times, the non-laidoff end up more traumatized by a poorly handled job reduction than those who were actually reduced.

I wonder if there's a market for a "They've been laid off, but you have been left behind, and, gosh, you have a salary, how unlucky can you be?" counselling business.  I wonder if I am empathic enough to start one?

Unbelievably it also cites:

One site recommends sending letters to a former employee's family thanking them for the support of "their" family member during this tough time.

I wonder if that's before or after the axe falls?

Now, do not get the idea that I'm slating 1to1 over the article.  All they're doing is synthesising an article from the inordinate amount of mealy mouthed trash out there.  And what a lot there is.  But I did place a comment at the foot of their article, and I thought that, just maybe, you would like to see it here, too.

I said:

Oh. Yes. "Softening the blow of redundancy".

This is, of course, "great" for the folks left behind by this tranche of redundancies. I watched this in the early nineties when I had what proved to be the mixed fortune of working for Wang Laboratories.

The first round of redundancies (layoff does sound so much nicer, but you still get to not be able to pay your bills!) had security guards leading the unfortunate first swathe from the premises.

That first swathe were the folk that "everyone hated anyway", so they never mattered to anyone left behind. Yeah, right!

The next swathe was done a little kinder, then the next, then the next. By the time they got to me I was sitting in the VP of HR's office while he finished a phone call and then told me I was finished, too.

And all the empathy in the world did not make that last recession any easier.

A few years ago I watched Gartner make people redundant. The announcement came round that the redundancies had finished. A sigh of relief went up and the tension eased. Then a colleague was called to the management suite and made redundant. That worked well. She was more upset than anyone could possibly imagine.

Fancy words and fancy letters to the family (give me strength!) mean nothing. The only thing that softens the blow is hard cash. And that is pretty much the only thing that softens it for the folk left in employment in the organisation, too - the hope that, when you get your appointment for summary execution, you get as good a payoff as the last round did.

The real advice for the current time is "Do not own shares in your employer, because you lose your savings as well as your job when it goes belly up!

I guess you do have to be in my age group to "get" it. 

You have to have lived through the last recession and wondered how you were, as a skilled professional, ever going to get another job, because so many other skilled professionals were also suddenly in the job market wondering how they were ever going to get another job.  

You have to be someone who thought you had a career and who discovered that you just had a very disposable thing:  A job.

And you have to realise that the personnel department (or Human Resources, as they love to be called nowadays) work to protect the employer, not the employee.

The minute HR starts saying stuff about how valuable everyone is, start looking.  And hope you can land a payoff and a new job on the same day.

No, never have shares in your employer's organisation.  Never.  Take stock options and exercise them for a same day trading profit, but never hold their shares.  They don't care about you, so why would you ever care about them?