More than 20,000 times last year in the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, midsize and large companies responded to adversity by slashing on average about 100 staff members at a time. Considering all the news coverage about the economic downturn and the poor job market, that might, at first glance, seem like a dog-bites-man story. But that is a lot of jobs. Did circumstances always merit the drastic actions? If so, were the actions taken deliberately and carefully, with all appropriate respect toward the people involved? What sorts of provisions were made to ensure that key talent was protected? These questions are important because they go to the heart of how companies avoid lasting damage in the marketplace and build long-term value.
Trying to get a handle on the answers from publicly available data is problematic, as even a broad-based research effort would be brought to a halt at the gates of internal company performance information and organizational dynamics. But it is a safe assumption that many of these 20,000 organizations did destroy value somewhere along the way by cutting capacity that they soon had to replace, by making poor choices as to who should go and who should stay, by being careless in communicating the rationale for change and protecting the motivation levels of surviving employees, and by missing the... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
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