After layoffs - Next steps for managers

The layoff announcements keep coming and are unlikely to stop anytime soon. This week,among other news, we learn Alcoa will layoff over 13,000 employees and Macy’s is closing stores. Most of the media attention focuses on the plight of those who lose their jobs. This is appropriate since those laidoff due to industry-wide economic forces have a difficult time finding new jobs, as those in the financial services industry can attest.

Another group of people with a challenge after layoffs are the managers left with the task of motivating and focusing the nervous and possibly demoralized remaining employees. Managers can act to can make the post-layoff period a time of momentum building and innovation.

1. Vision and Mission work. Every employee knows times are difficult and everyone is asking themselves the question ‘Will our organization survive?’ Don’t pretend this private questioning isn’t happening. Confront it head on with a conversation about the mission of the organization. What makes the company special? How do the economic difficulties create opportunities to re-ignite the vision? How can each employee contribute to the mission? A vision is not a luxury during a time like this. Employees are looking for a reason to believe in the future of the organization. Give them one or, even better, create one with them.

2. Invite Innovation through Flexibility. Your employees know the business as well as anyone. Give them the autonomy to help solve the organization’s challenges. Share what you know about industry headwinds and future trends. Invite your employees to find solutions or new market niches to exploit the changes in the industry.

3. Initiate new Communication Channels. Find a way to institutionalize new internal communication modes. Make it clear that employee ideas are welcome and create a new forum to report out to your employees and hear back from them. This could be a weekly video conference, a monthly meeting, a company wiki. The structure the works depends on the culture of your organization.

4. Start a new strategic planning exercise. A good strategic planning process trains participants to think strategically and think differently about their industry. If your goal is to get employees throughout the organization to innovate, then you want them to be able to innovate in a strategic manner. Initiate a strategic planning exercise as a training and employee development task. The main goal is not to create a new strategy but to get your employees to better understand the current strategy, help modify the strategy to match the new environmental constraints, or help guide their innovative thinking.

5. Build an internal expertise and knowledge development network. The destruction of informal knowledge networks is a hidden cost of any layoff. Often the informal knwoledge is not even recognized until it disappears after the layoffs. The post layoff time is ideal for building a snapshot of the expertise network within the organization and using this to identify mentors and opportunities for employee development.

The bottom line is to give employees a sense that they have some control over the future of the organization and that the future of the organization is strong. Since the recent past of the organization did not go so well, the only way to create some positive momentum is to take real, visible action demonstrating why the future will be different.