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The company where I work has been going through problems and for the past few months people keep being let go. After 4 months of watching an average of 2 people

by throw1988_9121 10y ago

The company where I work has been going through problems and for the past few months people keep being let go. After 4 months of watching an average of 2 people loose their jobs per month, I had the idea to register dayssincelastlayoff.com. My idea was to have a 'X Days Since Last Injury' kind of image on the site that would just show this stat for various companies. My thinking was that knowing how frequently a company was letting go of it's employees might be a good metric to figure out if the management knows what they are doing. And my experience (written below) leads me to believe that a company laying off a small number of employees but doing it frequently is worse than a company that just does one huge round of layoffs. This is the first time I've been part of a company that's going through a round of layoffs, and I understand that there are business decisions that lead to this. But the way I've seen it happen here is that instead of one massive round of layoffs (which they had as well. Fired around 8 people at the same time when the down sizing started) the management here kept firing 1 or 2 people at a time every month. From a morale perspective, this felt worse than loosing a bunch of people at once. Because this way, everybody keeps thinking if they are next. Has anyone else seen this happen, and did the company survive after this? Because what's happening at my work is that now, everybody has started looking for new jobs, because of the uncertainty. The layoffs have stopped since the last month, so I lost interest in the idea. But just to throw it out there, could something like this ever be useful? If yes I might do something useful with the domain.

hinkley 10y ago
Pretty much my experience. Once one useful person gets laid off, everyone can't help but think they're the next useful person to get laid off. And in small groups it feels personal. So now you're playing CYA instead of taking the good kinds of risks with big payoffs.
- throw1988_9121 10y ago
  In your opinion what hurts morale more? One big round of layoff, or multiple smaller rounds? I've only seen the later happen, and personally I think I'd prefer the first one. If you know that after that large layoff round the rest of the company is safe, I'd venture that might be better for the morale of the remaining employees.
  - mixedCase 10y ago
    It requires a certain kind of attitude that only a small minority of all people have to keep morale high in a situation where you can be fired any second without warning instead of going through the office looking like a kid who just shat his diapers.
  - buro9 10y ago
    > In your opinion what hurts morale more? One big round of layoff, or multiple smaller rounds? Both hurt morale. I've seen many rounds of redundancy and layoffs in UK companies and both the huge layoff rounds and the slowly trimming back everywhere. With the big rounds, the "We'll only do this once so we'll do it big and won't do it again" is never true. The whole company knows it's just time but at least you can prepare. The axe is on a pendulum and if you give it a lot of momentum and swing from a great height it will swing back in good time and take off another chunk of the company. With the small rounds of denying there is an issue and trimming a person from each team, it feels like you are being hunted and it's easy to walk around and see that the company isn't doing enough to address whatever the issues are, it's too cautious. The axe is on a pendulum and if you only swing it a little the cadence is much higher and it will swing often and constantly slice of a little. The axe is on a pendulum, once it starts swinging it will swing again. It never swings just once.
    - throw1988_9121 10y ago
      If I'm understanding this correctly, does this mean no company can recover from a situation where they had to let go of people?
      - CapitalistCartr 10y ago
        Companies are too cautious, too much in denial. The first cut is like a surgeon trainee making his first incision: too little, too late. Then comes the bigger cut, but its still not enough. Of course its not enough; by now the executives (who don't know what to do, who caused the mess and should be the first to go) have latched on to layoffs as the panacea to bring back the good times, the fruits of which they enjoyed but never understood. Layoffs can be necessary in a company, but they only work in conjunction with other actions, carefully managed together by leadership with vision and courage. I've watched executives argue over laying off a man that was costing them $5.00 per hour (and cleaning their bathrooms), but ignore everyone around the management meeting table.
gorbachev 10y ago
I went through this once. It sucks. The company used to lay off groups of people every other Friday or so. A friend lost a job every time. Everyone knew the company was going to shut down and we were just waiting it out. It was during the dot.com bubble burst, so it wasn't like there were millions of new jobs to jump to. I finally got my Friday meeting after something like 6 rounds.
epynonymous 10y ago
this is often times done on purpose, for companies listed on the nasdaq or nyse, i believe they have to announce publicly if they're laying off x% (i think it's like 7 or 9%). if they're less than x% then they can totally disregard public notification which helps with morale.
msbot 10y ago
This happened at my prior job which ambush fired me back in February. I noticed that their main investors had started to back out of tech investments in general, and then heard about several rounds of layoffs since then. Friends told me about a morale drop, but they are also friends, and might have been trying to soften the blow. Anyhow, I like your idea for dayssincelastlayoff.com.

hinkley 10y ago

Pretty much my experience. Once one useful person gets laid off, everyone can't help but think they're the next useful person to get laid off. And in small groups it feels personal. So now you're playing CYA instead of taking the good kinds of risks with big payoffs.

throw1988_9121 10y ago
In your opinion what hurts morale more? One big round of layoff, or multiple smaller rounds? I've only seen the later happen, and personally I think I'd prefer the first one. If you know that after that large layoff round the rest of the company is safe, I'd venture that might be better for the morale of the remaining employees.
- mixedCase 10y ago
  It requires a certain kind of attitude that only a small minority of all people have to keep morale high in a situation where you can be fired any second without warning instead of going through the office looking like a kid who just shat his diapers.
- buro9 10y ago
  > In your opinion what hurts morale more? One big round of layoff, or multiple smaller rounds? Both hurt morale. I've seen many rounds of redundancy and layoffs in UK companies and both the huge layoff rounds and the slowly trimming back everywhere. With the big rounds, the "We'll only do this once so we'll do it big and won't do it again" is never true. The whole company knows it's just time but at least you can prepare. The axe is on a pendulum and if you give it a lot of momentum and swing from a great height it will swing back in good time and take off another chunk of the company. With the small rounds of denying there is an issue and trimming a person from each team, it feels like you are being hunted and it's easy to walk around and see that the company isn't doing enough to address whatever the issues are, it's too cautious. The axe is on a pendulum and if you only swing it a little the cadence is much higher and it will swing often and constantly slice of a little. The axe is on a pendulum, once it starts swinging it will swing again. It never swings just once.
  - throw1988_9121 10y ago
    If I'm understanding this correctly, does this mean no company can recover from a situation where they had to let go of people?
    - CapitalistCartr 10y ago
      Companies are too cautious, too much in denial. The first cut is like a surgeon trainee making his first incision: too little, too late. Then comes the bigger cut, but its still not enough. Of course its not enough; by now the executives (who don't know what to do, who caused the mess and should be the first to go) have latched on to layoffs as the panacea to bring back the good times, the fruits of which they enjoyed but never understood. Layoffs can be necessary in a company, but they only work in conjunction with other actions, carefully managed together by leadership with vision and courage. I've watched executives argue over laying off a man that was costing them $5.00 per hour (and cleaning their bathrooms), but ignore everyone around the management meeting table.

gorbachev 10y ago

I went through this once. It sucks. The company used to lay off groups of people every other Friday or so. A friend lost a job every time. Everyone knew the company was going to shut down and we were just waiting it out. It was during the dot.com bubble burst, so it wasn't like there were millions of new jobs to jump to. I finally got my Friday meeting after something like 6 rounds.

epynonymous 10y ago

this is often times done on purpose, for companies listed on the nasdaq or nyse, i believe they have to announce publicly if they're laying off x% (i think it's like 7 or 9%). if they're less than x% then they can totally disregard public notification which helps with morale.

msbot 10y ago

This happened at my prior job which ambush fired me back in February. I noticed that their main investors had started to back out of tech investments in general, and then heard about several rounds of layoffs since then. Friends told me about a morale drop, but they are also friends, and might have been trying to soften the blow. Anyhow, I like your idea for dayssincelastlayoff.com.