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 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 [...]

Starbucks to Downsize, Close 300 Stores, Discount Coffee & Breakfast Food Pairings

Update 2-9-09 from the Wall Street Journal:
Starbucks Corp., which built a coffee empire on its premium image, wants to convince customers that its drinks aren’t that expensive.

The company said Monday that it’s selling discounted pairings of coffee and breakfast food for $3.95, a type of promotion long [...]

How to Lay Off People Properly Amidst the Unrelenting Downsizings

Even though we believe that layoffs should be used as a last resort, and have the published research to support it, there do come times when it’s necessary to lay off employees.  That’s why it was good to see Simon Constable in the Wall Street Journal recently recommend several ways in which to do it [...]

Zappos Uses Social Networks for Announcing Downsizing

Here’s an excerpt of my interview in today’s Investor’s Business Daily:
E-tailer Zappos has held its own in a sluggish economy. In fact, the online shoe seller’s revenue rose from $840 million in 2007 to $1 billion in 2008, though it fell short of its expected $1.1 billion in sales, noted Tony Hsieh, Zappos’ CEO, who’s [...]

Short Circuit City: Bad Downsizing By Any Other Name

Update 1-17-09
Two months later, Circuit City will be no more.  I hope our Samsung LCD t.v. we purchased from them two years ago never fails.
Circuit City Stores Inc. begins liquidating its remaining 567 U.S. stores on Saturday, the largest retail casualty yet in a recession that is expected to claim more victims.
The electronics and digital-media [...]