Downsizing with Grace

From The Straits Times - Sat Feb 20 2010

Downsizing with Grace
(If layoffs are your organization's only solution, do it with compassion)
Extracts:

Both 'survivors' and displaced workers also experience tremendous emotional and psychological trauma.
Companies therefore have to ensure that they develop appropriate and well thought out plans, before implementing the downsizing process and even more importantly, after the downsizing process is complete, to meet these challenges.
How you treat the people who leave and the people who remain is crucial. How downsized employees are treated directly affects the morale and retention of valued, high performing employees who remain.

Critical decisions
Downsizing is often executed with a brisk, callous efficiency that leaves laid-off employees angry and surviving employees feeling helpless and demotivated.
They produce a work environment of withdrawal, risk averse decision making, severely impaired morale, and excessive finger pointing.

Be Respectful
Many poorly executed lay-offs treat employees like children. Information is withheld and doled out unwillingly. How laid-off employees are treated is how surviving employees assume they may be treated.
When they see the company treating laid-off employees poorly, they will start looking for a better place to work, fearing their heads will be next to roll.

-Article by Chris Fenney, co-founder and director of Training Edge International.
www.trainingedgeasia.com