How Long Can You Live on Your Severance and Savings if You’re Downsized?

Organizational downsizing has other negative effects that are not always very visible.  For example, today’s Wall Street Journal profiles several laid-off individuals who have had to rely on their severance packages and savings while they seek reemployment:
SILVER SPRING, Md. — Paul Joegriner hasn’t worked since March 2008, when he was laid off from his $200,000-a-year [...]

Downsizing with Downsizing Employee Morale — The Latest from France

The French business magazine, Business Digest, recently interviewed us as part of their profile of publication this spring in the MIT Sloan Management Review.  We were able to elaborate on our study and provide additional information not available in our original article.  Here is an excerpt from the Business Digest article:
In the face of a [...]

Downsizing at Harvard: Hold the Eggs and Bacon

Cost-cutting and downsizing is all relative, as evidenced by this article about Harvard.  At least we got powdered scrambled eggs for breakfast each.  day when I was an undergrad at Princeton (I assumed they were powdered as they didn’t taste like fresh eggs; maybe they weren’t chicken eggs…).

By the way, Wake Forest U typically did [...]

Our research featured in HR Magazine

One of the challenges of scholarly research is whether or not it is relevant to practitioners.  Since we both worked for General Motors prior to graduate school, we feel strongly that our research should help the folks who work 9 to 5 (like we used to do!).
Our recent Sloan Management Review piece was just summarized [...]

GM to Furlough Salaried Employees

This from today’s Wall Street Journal:
General Motors Corp. confirmed Wednesday it will force salaried workers to take up to three months off each year with partial pay as part of an effort to reduce costs during its expected summer shutdown of its car-making plants.
The program, called Salaried Downtime Paid Absence Policy, states that salaried and [...]

Downsizing the Company Without Downsizing Morale

Update:
Our coauthor and good friend Professor Gretchen Spreitzer of the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business was recently interviewed about our article, elaborating on our key findings, and you can listen to the interview here.
Our article on how to improve organizational flexibility, innovation, and internal communication to improve trust during downsizing was just published [...]

Do Women Suffer From Layoffs More Than Men?

On the surface of it, this post’s title/question seems absurd, or at least should call for elaboration.  Layoffs should cause harm equally no matter what the sex of the victim is.  However, as CV Harquail writes provocatively and compellingly in her latest blog post, women may indeed be victims of layoffs in more ways than [...]

Redeploy Your Employees Rather than Lay Them Off

All too often, companies resort to layoffs instead of trying other approaches to reducing costs and improving the bottom line during periods of economic retrenchment.  The Boston Globe recently interviewed me about redeploying employees within an organization as a way to reduce costs yet still preserve the human capital  that they’ve invested in.  Here’s an [...]

Cutting Costs without Cutting People — Rhino Foods Does it Right!

Ted Castle and Rhino Foods were profiled in the latest issue of Business Week for being able to reduce costs without resorting to layoffs, not an easy accomplishment as demonstrated by the hundreds of thousands of layoffs by scores of firms around the U.S. and around the world over the past several weeks.
As Matthew Boyle [...]

Bank of America Layoffs Need More Transparency

I have many former students who work for Bank of America (or did, as some have already been let go), and so I am always interested in knowing what is happening at the bank.  One of my former students alerted me to this article in today’s Charlotte Observer:
Two months since Bank of America Corp. announced [...]