Tag Archives: layoffs

More Reasons to Avoid Layoffs

As its former head of human resources once told me: “If people are your most important assets, why would you get rid of them?”
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In fact, there is a growing body of academic research suggesting that firms incur big costs when they cut workers. Some of these costs are obvious, such as the direct costs of severance and outplacement, and some are intuitive, such as the toll on morale and productivity as anxiety (“Will I be next?”) infects remaining workers.
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research paints a fairly consistent picture: layoffs don’t work. And for good reason. In Responsible Restructuring, University of Colorado professor Wayne Cascio lists the direct and indirect costs of layoffs: severance pay; paying out accrued vacation and sick pay; outplacement costs; higher unemployment-insurance taxes; the cost of rehiring employees when business improves; low morale and risk-averse survivors; potential lawsuits, sabotage, or even workplace violence from aggrieved employees or former employees; loss of institutional memory and knowledge; diminished trust in management; and reduced productivity.
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As bad as the effects of layoffs are on companies and the economy, perhaps the biggest damage is done to the people themselves. Here the consequences are, not surprisingly, devastating. Layoffs literally kill people. In the United States, when you lose your job, you lose your health insurance, unless you can afford to temporarily maintain it under the pricey COBRA provisions. Studies consistently show a connection between not having health insurance and individual mortality rates.

Five Managerial Fallacies Concerning Layoffs

The Top Five Managerial Fallacies Concerning Layoff Survivors by David Noer, author of Healing the Wounds: Overcoming the Trauma of Layoffs and Revitalizing Downsized Organizations.

The overwhelming consensus of downsizing research is that layoffs do not achieve their going in productivity goals. Survivors of most organizations are angry, depressed, anxious and fearful. They are not able or willing to take risks or focus on increasing customer service. At the very time organizations need them to be the most creative and energetic; they hunker down in the trenches, absorbed in their own toxic survivor symptoms.
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Leadership in the post-layoff environment is a helping, not a controlling relationship, and requires reaching out, not closing down and hiding behind a facade of toughness and control. Organizations that have successfully helped employees rebound from the trauma of layoffs have required their managers to learn and apply basic helping skills.

Read the full post, for more good points by David Noer. Obviously when managements failures result in layoffs it is a huge blow to respect for people. It is very challenging to maintain lean thinking or Deming based improvement efforts when layoffs are needed. And if that failure isn’t addressed and explained and details provided on why the leadership failed and what is being done to fix those problems with the management system, the challenges grow.

I am very disappointed in management that resorts to layoffs as the easy solution to their failed leadership. Most of the time layoffs are an indication management does not respect people in any way, no matter what they say. Now, I do believe, it is possible that a company has been failed by past leadership and gotten into a position where layoffs are the right choice, but most companies choose layoffs as just another MBA spreadsheet “management” exercise and those companies pay a heavy price for such poor management.

Cutting Hours Instead of People

When financial and economic realities reach the point that labor costs must be cut I believe a good option to consider is cutting hours (and pay) instead of people. Some people will have extreme hardship if the cut in hours and pay is significant, but once you get is a bad situation no answers are likely to be without problems. I would try to offer the cuts to those that want them first. I would likely take an unpaid sabbatical, if offered, and the organization was in financial trouble.

Another way of doing something similar is profit sharing (where costs go down when profits go down). You should be careful how such sharing is designed, it can create bad incentives if done incorrectly. Also by paying a portion of wages as bonuses that expense can be reduced when times are bad without layoffs.

The Rise of the Four-Day Work Week

Like many companies, Pella is looking to cut expenses because of the economic downturn. But instead of laying off more workers, the Iowa manufacturer of windows and doors is instituting a four-day workweek for about a third of its 3,900 employees. Chris Simpson, a senior vice-president at the company, acknowledges it’s an unconventional move… it doesn’t want to be caught short of experienced workers.
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According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of employees who normally work full-time but now clock fewer than 35 hours a week because of poor business conditions has climbed 72%, to 2.57 million in November 2008, from 1.49 million in November 2007.

Some Firms Cut Costs Without Resorting to Layoffs

Hypertherm Inc. has never laid off a permanent employee in its 40-year history. A 20% downturn in sales in recent months led the closely held maker of metal-cutting equipment to eliminate overtime, cut temporary staff and delay a facility expansion, says Chief Executive Dick Couch.

Managers are transferring employees to busy segments from those with less work. The Hanover, N.H., company also may bring some outsourced manufacturing in-house to keep its 1,100 workers busy, Mr. Couch says.
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Private companies, like Hypertherm, may feel less outside pressure to cut jobs and a deeper commitment to employees than publicly held firms, some experts say. Still, a few public companies — including Lincoln Electric Co. and steelmaker Nucor Corp. — also have no-layoff policies.

Good for them. Smart management practices that pay off in long term results. One thing I think some employees forget is the value of such respect for employees. When times are good it is easy to see the lure of higher pay, over long term stability. Layoffs are never good. If you work with an employee and cannot find a way for them to provide value after serious effort then letting them go is fine with me. But that shouldn’t have to do with the economy. That has to do with them not being able to fulfill their responsibilities. I am very suspicious of such claims though, normally management either needs to fix the hiring process or the employee management/development process. The system is the problem not the person (the vast majority of the time).

Honda has Never had Layoffs and has been Profitable Every Year

Engineers Rule, 2006

Longtime auto analyst John Casesa, who now runs a consulting company, says, “There’s not a company on earth that better understands the culture of engineering.” The strategy has worked thus far. Honda has never had an unprofitable year. It has never had to lay off employees.
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The lean and compact Fukui, like all of his predecessors, is an engineer who started in R&D and later ran the subsidiary. While other auto chief-executives-to-be were punching keyboards in an accounting office, Fukui ran the company’s motorcycle racing operations. He’s still racing. He hikes the stairs to his tenth-floor desk–tenth floor so he’s in the middle of things at Honda’s 16-story Tokyo headquarters and a desk because executives at Honda don’t have offices. Honda doesn’t disclose executive pay in detail, but the sum of salaries and bonuses that Fukui shares with 36 board members, $13 million, is just about enough for the boss at a big American company.

I checked and Honda was also profitable in 2007 and 2008 fiscal year (ending in September) and no I see no evidence of any layoffs this year (when I look online).

Of all the bizarre subsidiaries that big companies can find themselves with, Harmony Agricultural Products, founded and owned by Honda Motor, is one of the strangest. This small company near Marysville, Ohio produces soybeans for tofu. Soybeans? Honda couldn’t brook the sight of the shipping containers that brought parts from Japan to its nearby auto factories returning empty. So Harmony now ships 33,000 pounds of soybeans to Japan. An inveterate tinkerer, Honda also set up a center nearby to develop better soybean varieties and improve agricultural processes.

Severance Plans to Respect People

Yahoo’s Severance Plans a Defense Against Microsoft? [the broken link has been removed]

Yahoo’s board of directors has created an expansive severance package for all full-time employees who are either terminated without “cause” or leave on their own with “good reason” following a “change in control of the company.”

The severance packages would extend regular compensation for a period of four months to two years, depending on the employee’s job level. Employees would also receive continued health benefits, financial assistance for finding a new job (up to $15,000) and accelerated vesting of stock options. The move comes as reports are circulating that Microsoft will go hostile in its acquisition bid, waging a proxy battle to replace Yahoo’s board rather than raise its offer.

Interesting. Yahoo does seem to be losing staff so there is a business reason (even for those that don’t think the way I do about benefiting all stakeholders). It also seems to fit with respect for people to me. I actually am leaning toward thinking this is something lean/Deming companies should adopt to show that the company does not support treating employees as costs to be reduced. I could see those that see companies more like balance sheets than system would object to implementing a new idea that makes MBA style layoffs more difficult. I am fine with that. I’m sure Yahoo! is actually driven partially by the poison pill feature of such a plan (which isn’t the greatest place to start but I can live with that). I haven’t thought this through completely but I like it now.

Bad Management Results in Layoffs

In response to Is Laying People off Really Anti-Lean? [the broken link was removed]:

Let’s say you, a Lean enthusiast, are named CEO of a mid sized manufacturing company. Let’s also assume your market has turned down and the constraint is clearly the market. Let’s also assume you need to improve operating income above all else. The final assumption is the company you inherited is not even good at mass production. They just stink at everything.

If you come into this situation and realize that you can implement some basic lean and six sigma principles and only need half the workforce to meet customer demand what do you do?

Layoffs are a failure of management. If the company has not been executing a long term strategy to respect people and manage the system to continually improve, manage for the long term, working with suppliers… it might be they have created an impossibly failed organization that cannot succeed in its current form. And so yes it might be possible that layoffs are required.

It is very easy to jump to layoffs as the “answer” though. While it is possible to construct a situation in which they make sense that such a hypothetical situation it rarely is the case that an organization is committed to lean and then makes layoffs. Instead they just think the same old way and mention the word lean since they see others doing it and layoff sounds like it is lean to someone that doesn’t know the first thing about lean thinking.

I would not see, “a focus on improving operating income above all else” as a lean way of thinking. Improving that is one focus among many that are needed to achieve long term success.

Does that mean a organization doing a great job of managing in a truly lean way may not find itself in a position where layoffs are necessary? No. Failing to predict and execute may have consequences and those may include layoffs. In your example things are confused a bit by separating the responsibility of getting into the mess from what to do next. Definitely, riding out a few poor quarters would be preferable. I have absolutely no question about that.

Continue reading →

Trust: Respect for People

Respect for People [the broken link was removed*], Toyota.co.jp

Respect for People has always been important to Toyota, and nowhere is this more evident than in the relationship among Toyota associates.
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There has been only one exception to this rule throughout Toyota’s entire history. In June 1950, during a postwar period of great hardship in Japan, the company was forced to choose between corporate restructuring or risking complete collapse. Then-President Kiichiro Toyoda battled for months for the sake of his employees, but ever-worsening conditions showed the company to be unsustainable without significant change.
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Management then vowed that this would be the first and last time such an event would come to pass at Toyota, and, in a gesture of respect to former employees, Kiichiro resigned from his position as president of the company.

A bit different than laying off tens of thousands of workers and then taking huge bonuses [the broken link was removed]. And in case you don’t know, I think Toyota’s approach is more honorable and what should be aimed for (I wouldn’t say the president always should resign but it should be a significant admission of failure).

Does this mean no workers ever come into conflict with Toyota management? No. But Toyota’s respect for workers is qualitatively different than that of most companies.

* sadly Toyota falls into the same short term thinking and failure to understand usability of internet technology trap that so many other organizations do. Many of those others fail in so many ways failing again isn’t so surprising, it is sad that Toyota can’t even follow basic long term thinking and web usability principles though.