Layoffs, Anxiety and Trust
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Layoffs, Anxiety and Trust

Ultimately this is what will define your culture and your employee engagement. Do your actions match your words? It’s not enough to say you care about mental health, diversity, or developing the people who work for you. You had better put something behind that. If you’ve had layoffs recently, don’t expect anyone to believe that you care about these things on your words alone. Those layoffs told everyone in the organization that they were expendable. They could be next, and the only thing that truly matters is how much they make for you. If you care about their growth, wellbeing and being a diverse company, you had better show up with something other than words.

Shared Links (weekly) Feb. 26, 2023

Shared Links (weekly) Feb. 26, 2023

Trust is Easily Broken

Trust is Easily Broken

Consider the message this sends to employees. This decision was made at a level above the person who is left to explain it to you. No one from that level wants to explain it or answer your questions. That’s not a trustworthy organization. That’s a leader hiding from people being impacted by their decisions.

That’s not a leader I’d want to work for. Some might even argue that they aren’t a leader at all.

When you lose that trust, you’ll lose the retention battle.

Do Layoffs Fix Anything, or Do We Have Them Because Everyone Else is Doing It?

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.

Shared Links (weekly) Jan. 22 2023

Shared Links (weekly) Jan. 22 2023