Why him and not me? That's the question many employees are asking themselves when job cuts are common.
Shiv Dhawan, Business Consultant with Tata Consultancy Services, says he has seen many people who have survived job cuts in their respective organisations feeling relieved as well as guilty — relieved as they still have a job, and guilty as they suffer from a collective feeling of melancholy due to the sudden departure of their co-workers.
Losing your pay cheque during a slowdown is horrible, but watching colleagues leaving can be an unnerving experience. More importantly, the survivors begin to wonder whether they are next in line for the pink slip, Dhawan says.
Why him and not me? That’s the question a large number of employees are asking themselves at a time when many companies are taking such blunt actions to get costs under control. Management consultants and psychologists have a fancy name for this — survivors’ guilt.
A report, published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, reviewed studies looking at job insecurity as opposed to unemployment and found that many who are still marching to their cubicles suffer from what they call the survivors’ guilt and this depression can be no less than that suffered by those who have been axed.
Wikipedia defines survivors’ guilt in general as “a mental condition that occurs when a person perceives himself or herself to have done wrong by surviving a traumatic event”. Employees who get to keep their jobs face sinking morale, anxiety and the uncomfortable feeling that they ought to be grateful for it all. And it’s a virus that is spreading fast simply because many companies just don’t know how to handle these situations gracefully. They also forget the maxim that an organisation’s culture is formed during the worst of times rather than during the best of times.
Management says questions like ‘why him and not me’ aren’t rational in nature and they only expose the weak side of those who ask such questions. “No company can help people who are bent on wallowing in self-pity and suffer from self-doubt. They should rather consult a psychologist,” says the HR head of a large organisation.
Dhawan says such reactions only strengthen his belief that HR people can be divided into two camps: One consists of immature people and the other of people strategising without any knowledge about what is happening at the grassroot level.
That may be an extreme reaction, but studies have shown survivors’ guilt is highly responsive to treatment if the management acts early. For example, some companies such as Infosys, TCS, ICICI Bank etc have done wonders to office morale by either offering outplacement assistance or additional training or counselling to people who they have to let go. The additional costs they have to bear are more than compensated for by the additional brand equity they acquire as employers of choice. And this helps when the tide turns — people whom you want just might like to stay back because you cared for them when they needed it the most.
This is also the time when the top management should engage its employees more. Some people might call it over-communication, but it may do a world of good to remove survivors’ guilt. Many companies hold town-hall meetings more frequently where employees are encouraged to let off steam against the management. Good HR heads of enlightened companies treat these town-hall meetings as diagnostic centres so that the doctor knows the exact nature of the ailment.
Dhawan says the management should also look beyond the obvious and figure out if there are other innovative methods to cut costs rather than downsizing. For example, many companies are going in for a “hotelling” concept whereby they don’t have to incur real estate costs.
For instance, he says, IBM has started an entirely office-free sales force in New Jersey. A lot of Fortune 500 companies have hot desks and touch-down areas where staff can plug in laptops and have face-to-face meetings as and when required. The original idea evolved from the cyber cafes that were set up so that people could surf the web. “There is a category of workers who do not have permanent desks or cubicles and call the office to reserve space when they need to be there, check in at the given time, and check out with another employee checking in after them — just like a hotel,” Dhawan says. This way, a company can save huge costs, reducing the need to go in for large-scale downsizing.
Finally, many companies give pink slip notices abruptly as layoffs are unpleasant and they want to avoid dealing with such unpleasantness directly. But a study by the Boston Consulting Group earlier this month says such an approach may work well with scorpions and snakes, but not with human beings. “This approach does not help a company trying to reshape itself during difficult times in order to be poised to take advantage of better times to come.”
So lay off people if you must, but beware of survivors’ guilt among your employees. In the long run, that can do a lot more harm than what is immediately visible.
