It should come as no surprise that as company after company announces layoffs and cutbacks, the problem of how to fire people properly has cropped up. After all, if so many employers haven’t figured out how to hire correctly or manage people properly once hired, is it a surprise they don’t know how to get rid of them, either?
Not that firing someone – or thousands of someones – is easy. The difficulty comes from two sources. First, there’s the guilt associated with taking away the source of someone’s livelihood. Second, if the person is being fired for not having done his job properly, there’s the discomfort of having to explain the poor performance without shattering the person’s ego.
The current wave of firings is actually pretty easy to explain: The economy is moving south and the main way for companies to cut costs is to cut people. (Of course, you don’t see too many chief executives trimming their multimillion-dollar salaries to help their companies make it through tough times, but that’s another story.) Since it’s all about slashing costs, the cutbacks really have nothing to do with the person fired. Here’s why that’s so important to remember.
Most of us when fired – and I’ve been there, too – tend to obsess about what we did wrong. Recurrent thoughts swirl around in our heads: If only I had worked harder; if only I had done that particular assignment better; if only I had curried favor with X and not Y, if only I were smarter, younger, more talented or better looking. Well, the good news about mass layoffs is that none of those things is true. You are being fired just because you draw a paycheck. How you did your job was irrelevant, and there is nothing you can do or could have done to avert the decision.
Companies, as you might expect, get nervous when undertaking mass firings and botch the job. They leak information, provide inadequate information and have no plans in place for the inevitable questions that arise.
“From a company’s standpoint, the decision to terminate a group of employees is fraught with potential legal, financial and public relations consequences,” said Dale Klamforth, a vice president with Drake Beam Morin, a human resources consulting firm. He says that managers must communicate the news of layoffs in a professional, legal and humane way in order to treat departing employees with sensitivity and to maintain a respectful corporate image.
Oh, that image. Ideally, companies giving thousands of employees the ax would want the departing hordes to say, “Gee, even though I got canned, XYZ was a great company; they treated me well and I’d work for them again.”
Is that possible? If you truly don’t take the firing personally and if your employer offers an adequate financial package to numb the pain – and if they handle the actual firing in a rational way – you might be able to spread the message the company wants.
(C) Copyright 2002 Evan Cooper. Syndicated by Paradigm News, Inc.
