Linked – Wellbeing Programs: Are Organizations Addressing the Cause
Don’t let your programs be junk, fix the culture. Recognize how your culture contributes to the problem and then do something about it.
Linked – Resignations Can Become Contagious
Humans don’t handle uncertainty well. They will seek out the path that has more certainty. You’re either providing that, or you’re not. If you’re not, you’re losing one of the important factors that impact retention. There’s a reason resignations are contagious. There’s a reason they go up right after layoffs or significant managerial change. We don’t like feeling uncertain.
So Now It’s Quiet Promotions?
All this time, this person is being evaluated based on how they lead the team they are not officially leading. They are even being measured based on the performance of people who don’t report to them and don’t know this is happening. Eventually, they may get promoted to the position they’ve been doing unofficially. Is that leveling up in your career, or is it wage theft?
One More on the Google Layoffs
This further emphasizes that living your life for work is not worth it in the end. How many similar stories are out there? How many people were mid-project or working late evenings on important deals and were let go the next day?
How important was that work, and the contribution they made to work? How important could it have been? Look at how it was considered so easily replaceabl
Quick Thought – Your Employees Are Individuals not Statistics
Apply the same logic to the preference of where to work. If a survey says 51% of people think hybrid is a good idea, then it is true that hybrid is the option that would be preferable to most people. Are your employees in that 51% or the other 49%? How about you talk to them instead of relying on some study that tells you what most employees want? Your team might not be “most” people. They each have individual values and priorities. Do you know what they are?
Do Layoffs Fix Anything, or Do We Have Them Because Everyone Else is Doing It?
Take a hard look at what leaders are saying about layoffs and what they focus on. Do they seem personally hurt and concerned for the people leaving? Do they have honest and transparent explanations for why they made these decisions? Or do they repeat platitudes about “recession,” costs, and other bits of financial jargon to explain away something so painful to the same people they were calling part of the family a week ago?
Families don’t cut the number of kids when money gets tight. Your workplace is not a family and does not deserve a level of commitment that matches your family or your health. Layoffs are sometimes necessary, but mostly just a nice tool to perk up the value of a company for a specific part of the structure or to make up for mistakes made by the same people making these job cuts.
That’s business. I’ve argued for years that business has a vested interest in employee well-being. Caring about your people is how you get their best. I hope leaders will continue to grow in that regard, but as an individual employee, you need to care about yourself more. If your job isn’t meeting your career needs in terms of money, development, or work-life balance, find a better one. You owe them nothing. They pay you to do a job until they decide not to. You owe them that work.
That is all.