If you were to ask managers around the world what part of their jobs they disliked the most, there’s a good chance you’d find laying off employees at the top of the list. Layoffs may be critical to a company’s survival and future success, but they are among the most challenging tasks for management.

What, then, should employers do when faced with the prospect of letting people go?

How to lay off an employee with dignity

Great workplaces find ways to maintain trust, even when tough economic times call for layoffs. 카지노 커뮤니티 랭킹 research has shown that companies who build trust during difficult times experience faster recovery to their business and to their brand.

How layoffs differ from furloughs

A layoff is permanent and initiated by big changes, such as the need to cut costs, downsize, and restructure an organization. A furlough is a temporary layoff — affected employees are still legally employed by their company, but can neither work nor earn money. In both cases, the employee is not considered at fault.

We looked at Great Place To Work® data from the Great Recession to see how leading organizations navigated those tumultuous days. 카지노 커뮤니티 랭킹 historical research and culture consulting with leaders at Best Workplaces™ navigating through crises found a number of common practices:

1. Promote a culture of listening

When leaders and managers focus their time listening to their people, they are better equipped to have tough conversations when layoffs are necessary.

When you really know your employees as people, rather than merely workers, you know what they value and what style of communication resonates best. You can have the conversation knowing how to best respond to their needs.

For example:

• Longtime employees might need reassurance that the layoff wasn’t due to poor performance
• Caregivers might be more focused on what the sudden drop in pay means for their family

Everyone reacts differently during stressful situations, but knowing who they are and what is important to them can help you be more sensitive and focused, making a difficult conversation more compassionate.

2. Support your managers

For many leaders, the need to lay off an employee is the most difficult part of their position and counts among their most unpleasant tasks.

Support your leaders by providing the tools and resources needed to deliver difficult news so that they feel more prepared for these conversations.

Some ways you can offer support :

• Meet with senior managers to acknowledge their challenges, unpleasant tasks ahead, and the importance of their role, as well as to describe your organization’s comprehensive approach for supporting employees — linking it to company values
• Call on experts in grief or resiliency training
• Create a forum (whether an online chat channel or recurring meeting) for leaders and HR to talk about employee reactions and how to answer difficult questions that come up

3. Communicate transparently and often

Open and honest communication will help employees understand how the crisis is affecting the company. This can create a greater understanding of the difficult decisions and the negative impact that follows.

While you don’t want to elicit fear or panic, employees do want to understand how their employer is faring in these tough economic times. People will be more resilient if they understand how outside forces are impacting their job, their profession, their industry, and their company.

When layoff details are announced, leverage all levels of leadership in the discussion, with the goal of consistent, clear, and effective two-way communication. For example, the CEO can host a town hall for the entire company. Then, general managers can host smaller sessions with business units, and an individual manager can lead a session for their own department.

Many leaders at great workplaces send regular videos recorded from their smartphones. These messages are imperfect but vital to sharing information timely and sincerely. Employees value this authenticity.

This sends a much stronger and more compassionate message of care, openness, and authenticity — things we all need and hold onto in times of insecurity.

4. Offer internal or external support to help affected employees

How an employer handles the layoff process and the following transition tells a lasting story of an organization’s culture. For this reason, we recommend going above and beyond what is expected. Extend extra care to employees during this challenging time.

The best companies provide resources, including:

• Time for employees to process, gather their belongings, and say goodbyes
• A severance package and extended health benefits
• Transition counseling, outplacement services, employee assistance, COBRA coverage, and resume preparation
• Assistance with programs and services such as unemployment benefits and new job retraining
• Introductions to, or job listings from, other local employers who may be hiring
• Written and verbal references to enhance employees’ job-seeking efforts

5. Follow up with laid-off employees

An employee’s relationship with a company shouldn’t end when they are laid off.

Your HR team can reach out to employees following their departure to:

• Check-in on their well-being as a whole person, not just a worker
• Provide tips or updates on any job connections made with other employers
• Remind them of resources that continue to be available, such as unemployment insurance
• Ensure they know that they can be rehired at a later date to replace attrition or for a new position

6. Engage and support your remaining employees

Following a layoff, remaining employees often feel “survivor’s guilt.” After all, the employees who left were their colleagues and friends. Left unaddressed, such feelings of guilt can sap morale and hang over your company culture, endangering its reputation and future.

Here are a few examples of ways you can combat this:

• Engage with remaining staff often to explain how the organization is helping those laid off and share whenever placements for new employment (internal or external) are successful so they can see the extension of care and respect
• Create space in meetings for employees to talk about how they are coping with the bad news
• Increase support to ensure employees have the resources they need, since remaining employees may be putting in long hours and picking up extra work
• Remind them about resources, such as the EAP and employee resource groups, so they can share and process their experiences
• Consider extra measures, such as the HR team repurposing their time to make personal calls to every employee to see how they are doing and what they need for support.

We’re here to support you through workforce changes

Large-scale layoffs can leave remaining employees nervous and anxious about their increased workload and overall job security. Through detailed surveys and data analysis, Great Place To Work 카지노커뮤니티™ can pinpoint exactly how your employees are feeling — right now. This helps you target your valuable dollars to preserve and improve the company culture you’re known for. Get started with your 카지노커뮤니티 to reveal exactly where you need to allocate resources to make the biggest impact.

Even when making hard choices like laying off employees, companies can build trust with workers.

While research shows that laying the groundwork ahead of a layoff is crucial for building relationships with employees and preserving trust, there are options for companies once a layoff has taken place.

identified five opportunities for companies to build trust with workers during or after a layoff. More than half of employees surveyed agreed that trust could be built by:

• Encouraging managers to increase communications with remaining team members (58%)
• Offering generous severance packages (57%)
• Being more transparent about the reasons for a layoff (57%)
• Providing outplacement services to employees who are laid off (53%)
• Hosting firmwide meetings to highlight company commitment to remaining employees (50%)

While 80% of employees surveyed said layoffs negatively impact trust in companies, just 55% said the way their company conducted a layoff damaged trust. That gap paints a compelling picture for business leaders about the value of reengaging your remaining workforce after a layoff.

Giving employees a voice

Even at great companies, sometimes the business requires making the painful decision to eliminate roles.

At Camden Property Trust, No. 33 on the Fortune 100 Best 카지노 커뮤니티 추천 to Work For® List in 2023, a need to streamline operations led to a reorganization starting in February of 2022. To keep employees informed and engaged, the company brought them into the process right from the beginning.

“In planning for our reorganization, we involved our on onsite teams and district managers in the decision-making process to determine what efficiencies and changes made sense for our business,” says Allison Dunavant, VP of organizational development at Camden.

Seeking employee input when making the tough decision to restructure or conduct a layoff can be daunting for business leaders. However, a commitment to deep listening opened new doors for Camden during the restructuring process.

“We recognized that with massive change, we weren’t going to get everything right,” Dunavant says. The only way to identify missteps was to engage with people at all levels for feedback.

“We did this through establishing working groups that involved all levels of employees, and solving issues that were important to them and important to the business,” Dunavant says.

“The message for us was ‘We’re listening.’" - Allison Dunavant, VP of organizational development at Camden

Building connection

Camden’s working groups offer an example of how to accomplish several of the goals Great Place To Work® research has outlined for companies facing a layoff decision:

• Reengage remaining workers around the purpose of the organization
• Offer a safe space for employees to work through challenges posed by workforce changes
• Increase touchpoints between managers and employees

Working groups at Camden were gathered right after the restructuring and immediately started offering feedback on processes that weren’t working. “They were honest,” Dunavant says. “We realized that the only way to eat the elephant is one bite at a time.”

“Remind leaders that vulnerability is OK.” - Allison Dunavant, VP of organizational development at Camden

The working groups also became essential partners for piloting new programs.

“We would give them some solutions and say, ‘Go try this out this week and bring it back to us next week. Let us know how it went. Talk to your teams, talk to your peers, see what they think,’” Dunavant says.  

As a result, the company was able to move much faster, and group participants were more engaged after seeing their feedback incorporated by the company.

“They’re also developing as leaders,” Dunavant says of group participants. “I’ve started to see a lot of these individuals as future leaders in our company, and they feel empowered to be able to make change because we’ve given them a space to do it.”

These working groups were so successful that Camden kept them even after completing its restructuring.

Participants in the working group deeply valued their opportunity to contribute to the future of Camden, and even saw the working groups as opportunities to reinforce relationships with their colleagues across the business.

“카지노 커뮤니티 랭킹 group is full of amazing leaders from all over the country, but we have one goal in mind: to improve our processes at Camden for our employees and our customers,” shares one general manager who participates in one of the groups. “This group fosters a safe, open space to talk about things honestly, to be real. And of course, in true Camden fashion, we also know how to have a lot of fun.”

Save the date: Attend our annual company culture conference May 7-9, 2024

Anxiety over a backlash

Why don’t more companies do everything they can to engage employees during a layoff or restructuring effort?

Listening is hard.

“The message for us was ‘We’re listening,’” says Dunavant, but stresses the importance of backing up that message with real listening programs. “Building trust is about delivering consistently — and that’s what we knew we had to do.”

Managers need resources and training to effectively respond to employee concerns in the wake of a layoff. Dunavant offered some tips:

1. Recognize the elephant in the room.

Start by addressing the concerns of employees when facing layoffs or restructuring. “Acknowledge the change and ask your team members how they’re doing,” Dunavant says.

2. Listen more than you talk.

“Be keenly observant of employees’ needs and offer encouragement and support,” Dunavant says. “Never say ‘I know how you’re feeling,’ because you don’t.”

3. Be honest — and admit what you don’t know.

“No one expects you to know all the answers or even understand how a change might impact somebody else,” she says.

4. Go beyond the survey.

“Put time and resources behind finding new ways and inventive ways to enroll them in the process of your future organization,” Dunavant advises.

Making surveys successful

Employee surveys are incredibly valuable in the wake of layoffs or restructuring. Surveys can identify opportunities for improvement, and ensure that workers remaining at your organization don’t disengage.

For leaders who are anxious about fielding a survey that might surface bad news, Dunavant recommends leaning into the discomfort.  

“It’s good for us to recognize the anxiousness,” she says. “Remind leaders that vulnerability is OK.”

It also helps to have a clearly defined purpose that can offer a call to action for both employees and leaders.

“The best thing a leader can do is recognize that change is hard — and enroll their employees in how to move through the hard,” Dunavant says.

Make sure you have resources to react and investigate the survey responses.

“Don’t engage in a listening campaign if you aren’t ready to recognize where you might have opportunity and be willing to make changes accordingly,” Dunavant warns.

Business results

When companies commit to listening while trying to reshape their workforce, the benefits go far beyond employee goodwill.

For Camden, engaging its employees to build a better workplace is a core part of its strategy to drive business results.

“The formula’s easy,” says Dunavant. “Engaged employees equals process improvement, which is a better customer experience, which leads to business results. Great employee experiences lead to great customer experiences.”

When you reengage employees in the wake of a layoff, you build trust that future layoffs are a last resort. When employees trust managers to do everything in their power to avoid a layoff, the business benefits. Employees are:

• 9x more likely to give extra effort
• 2x more likely to adapt quickly to business changes
• 4x more likely to stay with their company

With those results in mind, leaders should consider every opportunity to increase communication with employees after a layoff.

Start your survey

Want to learn how employees are responding to recent workforce changes? Use our industry-leading Trust Index™ Survey to identify opportunities to reengage your people.

After one of the hottest job markets in generations, the

Rampant inflation, which in turn has seen the Federal Reserve raise interest rates, has many forecasting an economic recession. Tech companies have been some of the most visible orgainzations to tighten their belts, with companies like , , and shedding jobs last year. Now the cuts are hitting other tech giants, including ,  and .

Even the best workplaces aren’t immune to these economic headwinds. Employees are losing trust in their workplaces.

“The best workplaces go through layoffs; it's part of business,” says Marcus Erb, vice president of data science and innovation at Great Place To Work®. “Nobody likes to have it happen, but it has to happen sometimes.”

Who gets cut has profound ramifications for efforts to diversify the American workplace. When Netflix laid off staff, that many of those let go had been working on diversity, equity and inclusion across the company. 

How companies conduct layoffs speaks volumes about how great employers distinguish themselves from merely average ones. A great workplace finds ways to care for employees even as they transition out of the organization. And companies that are serious about diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging take identity into consideration when pondering staff cuts.

A moment to prove your culture

Restructuring is a tipping point for company culture. Whether it’s a merger, acquisition, divestiture or workforce reduction, how a company handles change will impact its culture for years to come.

Researchers from Harvard and Wharton reviewed data from Great Place To Work, revealing that restructuring often widens the gap in the workplace experience for marginalized employee groups:

The gap for women and minority employees grew by 45% when a company underwent a merger, acquisition, divestiture or layoff.

Conversely, companies that supported five key employee groups (women, front-line workers, hourly male workers, long-tenured employees, employees of color) not only outperformed the competition, but saw stock market gains even as the overall economy sank. In a recession, these companies that care for their employees saw their financial performance improve.

“When you have these major economic downturns as a company, everybody's got to pitch in and do their best, adapt and be resilient,” Erb says. “And if [employees] don't trust you, they're not going to do that.”

How great workplaces handle layoffs

The data reveals strategies used by the best work cultures to mitigate the impact of layoffs on employees and employee experience. The overall approach can be separated into three separate phases: before, during and after.

1. Before a layoff

Leaders must double down on communication and clarity, says Tony Bond, chief diversity and innovation officer with Great Place To Work. Workers must be left with no doubt that layoffs were a last resort.

“If it doesn't feel that way, if you haven't cut costs in other areas (travel, expensive meetings) and you lay off people, then the optics on that aren’t great,” Bond says.

When Hilton, a recurring member on the Fortune 100 Best 카지노 커뮤니티 추천 to Work For™ list, had to lay off employees in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, its leaders didn’t mince words.

“Never in Hilton’s 101-year history has our industry faced a global crisis that brings travel to a virtual standstill,” President and CEO Chris Nasetta told employees.

And employees need to keep hearing from leaders throughout the process.

“It's clarity around communications, it's the quality of the communications, and it's also the frequency of the communications,” Bond says.

This is also the time to ask employees for input. Sourcing ideas from across the organization on cutting costs can help employees feel like they have some control over the situation. However, only in companies that have embraced a For All™ culture, where everyone is empowered to innovate, will such efforts be possible.

An emotionally intelligent appeal to workers stands in contrast to companies that have tried to bully workers into resigning of their own free will. Turning up the pressure or asking workers to isn’t the same as asking your team to help find cost-cutting measures to save jobs.

2. During a layoff

Great workplaces go the extra mile to personalize messaging, extend benefits to affected employees and even help them find new opportunities. Hilton worked with partners during the COVID-19 crisis to find landing places for thousands of displaced employees at organizations like Amazon, CVS and Walgreens.

Showing care also means thinking about how a layoff might disproportionately hit underrepresented groups.

“You really have to look at the landscape of who is being impacted,” Bond says. That means doing careful analysis and resisting the urge to limit the discussion around downsizing to a handful of leaders.

“Typically what happens in a downturn is that leaders get together and huddle separate from everyone else, try to figure things out and then come to people and articulate what's going to happen,” Bond says. The C-suite might want to restrict information around a decision to cut jobs, but Bond argues that the best companies do the opposite.

“They broaden their focus,” he says. “They talk to more people. They've engaged their people around decisions to be made. That process alone helps them really see it through the lens of belonging or diversity, equity and inclusion.”

When organizations get this wrong, the results can make headlines. When Better.com cut ties with hundreds of employees over Zoom, the callousness of the act .

카지노 커뮤니티 추천 that show care work to extend benefits to affected workers or even keep communication channels open so that team members can be rehired if the market improves.

3. After a layoff

The best workplaces make sure to engage remaining workers who are perhaps grieving their departed colleagues as well as taking on more work due to staff reductions. Failing to meet the moment with empathy will destroy trust.

“Even if you lay people off, you're still going to have people working for you—and they're paying attention to how you handled the layoff,” Erb says.

Giving employees an opportunity to express themselves isn’t expensive or complicated. It just requires leaders willing to provide space.

“Break people out into smaller groups and give them a few questions,” recommends Bond. “Just explore: ‘How are you experiencing things today?’ It's really as simple as that.”

Another important step is to connect remaining employees back to your company’s purpose. When trust is fractured because a friend is laid off, employees are looking for something that will let them feel good about continuing to work for the organization, Bond says.

“That's a time for organizations to really highlight the purpose and the mission and make sure people are rallied around the purpose.”

Leaders should be prepared for some strong emotions.

“It's almost like a death in the family, and you need to process it with the people that are close to you,” Bond says.

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