Linked – Companies Can’t Ask You to Shut up to Receive Severance, NLRB Rules
This might interest some folks who’ve recently been laid off.
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.
Another New Term for People Looking out for Themselves – Career Cushioning
The quickest way to cut expenses is to cut staff. This is the way of the world in the 21st Century. Until someone comes along and changes that, it only makes sense to keep your options open. As the article I linked points out, that can mean keeping your knowledge and skills up to date, staying in touch with your network, and possibly looking at side gigs you could hop to if you find yourself in a company that is laying off staff.
I don’t see anything wrong with that. It’s not disloyal to your employer. That’s not the world we work in any longer.
Linked – Job Insecurity Is Toxic to Health
I’m sure there are still some “old-school” bosses running around who believe the best way to motivate employees is to threaten them and never let them forget that they can be fired at a moment’s notice.
Turns out that they aren’t motivating as much as actively harming them.
Linked – Fired admin cripples former employer’s network using old credentials
I spent a lot of my time these days focused on onboarding, bringing in new people, getting them up to speed, and contributing. That’s an important process. So is off-boarding, because when you don’t have a proper process for departing employees, stuff like this can happen.