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Layoffs and Downsizing Strategies

Employment sometimes ends for negative reasons such as layoffs, downsizing, job termination or firing. Layoffs can be particularly difficult to recover from because employees don't often see layoffs coming. Even when they suspect layoffs are imminent, no one wants to believe they will be the employee to experience layoffs. Learn successful, caring strategis for doing layoffs.
Got the Layoff Blues?
Here's hope and help. Whether you're an employer dealing with downsizing and layoffs or an employee looking for a new work home, these resources will help. Find job search ideas and interviewing techniques. Learn how the best employers treat the survivors of their layoffs. Get in touch with your dreams; set your goals; we'll help you chart your future course. You don't have to do this alone.
Best Practices in Layoffs
Best practices in layoffs matter for the employees you lay off and the employees who survive the layoffs. Employee layoffs allow you to cut costs while preserving your relationship with your most critical employees. These are best practices of employers toward the employees they must lay off. Find out how to help the employees who survive the layoffs maintain positive morale and motivation.
WARN Act Requirements
The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN Act) offers: "protection to workers, their families and communities by requiring employers to provide notice 60 days in advance of covered plant closings and covered mass layoffs. This notice must be provided to either affected workers or their representatives (e.g., a labor union); to the State dislocated worker unit; and to the appropriate unit of local government." The WARN Act requires 60 days notice to stakeholders.
How to Cope When Coworkers Lose Their Jobs
You’re sad, you’re scared, and you’re worried that your job might be the next to go. You’re also relieved, you’re thankful, and you feel guilty that you still have a job. You’re suffering from the loss of your coworkers, and despite being a downsizing survivor, you feel a bit like a victim, too.
What Are the Advantages and Disadvantages of Employee Furloughs?
Furloughs are mandatory time off work with no pay. Generally implemented by employers as a cost saving measure, there are advantages and disadvantages to the use of furloughs as an alternative to layoffs. Find out more about furloughs.
Before You Do a Workforce Reduction
Before you do a workforce reduction, you will want to consider other cost cutting options.
Getting Fired or Laid Off?
Employment termination - no matter the cause - is scary, disorienting, and disruptive to habitual patterns. Getting fired is never fun; layoffs are equally disheartening. In either scenario, your feelings of self worth are dealt a blow. Just when you need a positive outlook to help you find your next opportunity, you feel dizzy as if your whole world is spinning out of control. Don’t despair. Better? Prepare yourself for your next layoff or employment termination – before the fateful meeting.
Survivors Can Soar After Layoffs or Downsizing
If you do the right things right, you can minimize, and even eliminate, the negative organizational impacts of layoffs. Find out how to minimize the impact of layoffs and downsizing on your survivors, the staff that remain following a layoff or downsizing.
Layoff Survivors
For whatever reason, your organization initiated layoffs, downsizing, right-sizing, eliminated redundancy, or cut staff. No matter what you called it in your organization, layoffs, downsizing or redundancy, you all have something in common -- survivors. Learn more.
Layoffs With Dignity
Downsizing or doing layoffs is a toxic solution. Used sparingly and with planning downsizing can be an organizational lifesaver, but when layoffs are used repeatedly without a thoughtful strategy, downsizing can destroy an organization's effectiveness. How you treat people really matters - to the people who leave and the people who remain. Learn more.
Employment Ending Checklist
Employees leave your organization for good and bad reasons. On the positive side, they find new opportunities, go back to school, retire or land their dream job. Less positively, they are fired for poor performance or poor attendance or experience a layoff because of a business downturn. In each instance, you need an employment termination checklist to help the employee exit process go smoothly.
I Just Lost My Job: How Am I Going To Tell My Kids?
One of the responsibilities of a human resources professional is to let employees know that their job has been eliminated. Job loss and the following job search are painful and upsetting for most people. Additionally, parents must tell family members about the job loss and mitigate their fears about the family, the income and the job search. Here are ten tips.
Perform Exit Interviews: Questions for Exit Interviews
The exit interview is your opportunity to obtain information about what your organization is doing well - and, what your organization needs to do to improve. Exit interviews are key to organization improvement since rarely will you receive frank feedback from current employees. The exit interview questions you ask help you obtain actionable information. This is how to conduct an exit interview.
How to Improve Exit Interview Participation Rates
Exit interviews are one of the best ways to get true and honest feedback from employees. The downside is that it takes time to build up a significant amount of data from exit interviews. Increasing your participation rate can help you get greater amounts of actionable information faster from your exit interviews.
Pink Slip? What Next?
Are you looking at layoffs or downsizing in the near future? About's Alison Doyle can help you to know what to do in the event you experience a layoff or downsizing.
Alternatives to Layoffs
Reducing the workforce has become an automatic response for companies who need to cut costs to look good for Wall Street. Layoffs and downsizing are wrong. Layoffs are counter-productive. Layoffs should be a last resort, not a first choice for a skilled executive, says Management Guide, John Reh.
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