Given recent events, I faced the question posed in this post and came to the same conclusion. Should you post that you’re #OpenToWork? A tale of two labor markets. Economic theory suggests that the people laid off or searching for a job in boom times are different from those laid off in a recession. If…
She mentions a round of layoffs as an example of breaking trust, and I’m glad she included that. All too often, when a round of layoffs occurs, senior management will return to talking about the culture or set of core values they expect all employees to follow without ever acknowledging that it’s different now. You can’t just return to talking about the importance of teamwork and diversity when you just canned 10% of the team as if nothing happened.
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Free Career and Job Search Tools– with the news of more layoffs last week, this is timely.
This is true. If you’re struggling to find new hires, you need to grow the people you have to take on more, and you don’t grow them without a plan on how to do that.
It would help if you had a talent development plan. Without it, you’ll find increasingly essential roles in your organization with no one to do the work.
That doesn’t seem like a good situation.
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.
While I would love to end this with a condemnation of venture capitalists and hedge fund managers, I think it’s important to point out that many of us are complicit. Fund managers seeking the best short-term profits for their investments run funds whose shareholders include most of us. When we log in and look at our IRA or 401(k) accounts, we look for how much the value has increased, not what makes the most sense for society. Our account balance looks a little nicer when a company lays off 10,000 employees and the stock price increases.
It’s all entwined. To paraphrase Michael Corleone – “We’re all part of the same hypocrisy.”