It was 8 pm when Claudine, a fifty-something employee at a major US tech company, finished drafting her daily wrap-up email and sent it to teammates. She stayed on a bit longer for any replies before she called it a night.
As usual, before she logged off, she would list out tasks she needed to complete and brace for a typically hectic day ahead. Little did she know that, over three years at this firm, this would be how her journey ended.
She woke up the next day unprepared for the announcement: her role had been made “redundant” (jargon alert). She had 15 minutes before the company cut off all her access to their system. Baffled by the whole situation, Cladine did not get to bid any of her colleagues goodbye.
Worse, she had roughly around two weeks to find a new job in the same occupation otherwise she, as a foreign worker, would get deported from Singapore. As expected, she was unable to find new employment in such a short a time so Cladine had to pack her things and bid farewell to this country she had called home.
What happened to Cladine was unethical and extreme. But then to realize that it happened to 30,000 other workers (a sizable number of themforeign workers) is shocking.
Theirs is not the only company either with firings cutting deep into tech companies throughout the world over the last six months.
This type of corporate irresponsibility should not but has been normalised in the labour market. A lay-off is inherently awful. But it need not be so unethically cruel.
There are certain ways to mitigate the human factor when dealing with mass layoffs. Here are a few ways, including steps to take before a layoff decision.
· Management can engage with staff actively and consistently to address the company’s inefficiency. Cutting jobs is not one-size-fits-all. Yes, it immediately reduces spending. But some unnecessary expenses could result from operating inefficiency where its fixes lie in other means than the across-the-board downsizing. A case on point in large enterprises, a marketing team may be working to increase users’ social media engagements which overlaps significantly with the company’s sale projects. Working in silo doubles the company spendings while yielding only half a benefit. Managers should delineate each team’s responsibilities to prevent the redundancies which cannot happen without their on-hand and pre-emptive engagements.
· Management should treat departing staffs well. Being decent to departing employees is the bare minimum. After all, employees had put hearts and minds into working before the company decided they are no longer needed. This is chiefly important for international workers whose right to stay hinges on their employment status. The company could offer legal support for work permit or delay the effective date of lay-off for international staff until they can secure their visa status. Showing that the company cares about the let-go workers also restores trusts in management among the surviving staffs which could reduce the impact on the overall productivity.
· Executives, as decision-makers, should own up to their own mistakes and admit responsibilities. When announcing lay-off, companies always blame the poor economic outlook and market condition. However, corporate leaders were the ones who fail to reasonably foresee such a possibility and continuously expand their companies.. As a start, managers can voluntarily forego their salaries, or at least reduce them meaningfully. When the pandemic first hit, Agoda’s John Brown announced that, to save costs, the company would cut senior managements’ salaries by 20% while as a CEO he would forego his salary for the remainder of 2020. While Brown was not to be blamed for not foreseeing the possibility of a deadly virus spreading across the globe, he still took responsibility to ensure the company could weather a pandemic-induced cashflow crunch without needing to cut jobs. (Although Agoda in the end laid off little less than 30% of its total workforce, staff understood that it’s the last resort.)
· If layoff is inevitable, companies must do it only once. It is inept at best and unethical at worst to announce series of lay-offs. It shows that the company did not think through of the impact it could have on departing and remaining staff members. Personnel will lose trust in management which might increase the voluntary turn-over rate at the time when the company needs a skeleton staff to keep the wheel spinning.