Ignoring the survivors
What we sometimes ignore however is the impact of downsizing on the people who are left behind. Things would be much easier if the survivors thought: "Well, aren't I lucky! I'm really motivated to be one of those chosen to stay! I'll work really hard to rebuild my internal networks in the company!" In reality, that is a completely unreasonable expectation.
How they really feel
Your survivors are having serious mixed emotions right at this point - yes they are relieved that they don't have to try to find a new job straight away, but on the other hand:
- you have just shattered their illusion that the organisation will never make people redundant
- they have lost some of their close working friends and contacts
- they may be having to pick up extra work or go without support services they were used to
- old habits (and humans are nothing if not habitual) have been disrupted, from who you call with a particular problem to who you eat lunch with.
What this means for your business
Everybody knows the stuff about sad employees = low productivity, poor quality, customer service problems. I'm not going to insult you by repeating all that here.
The other issue is that the working links people have made have been shattered. Teams have been broken up, and networks have been fractured.
(I know some teams need breaking up, but we're often talking about all teams, or at least many teams here.)
Teams develop over time (Bruce Tuckman, remember him?) and develop their own internal understandings about who does what, how people interact, how decisions get made and how things get done.
Break up a team, even by just removing one member, and you send that whole process back to square one. Add to that the fact that people are concerned about their job security - no amount of reassurances from management can prevent that. Bingo! One recipe for a team that fails to face up to the challenge, doesn't re-develop those working links.
You can imagine the impact of teams that don't operate smoothly, in a company that's already made job losses.
Prevent one lot of cuts turning into another
The good news is that you as a manager of the team can do something about this:
1 Recognise their pain
For something that doesn't pay the bills, recognition is massively valued by humans, whether we acknowledge it or not. We've all met people who say they "don't care what others think" of them, and we've all seen what a massive lie that is. Always.
Recognising the pain is easy: get them together for a team meeting. Explain that you want to do whatever you can to help them rebuild as a new team. Crack open a flipchart pad and ask them to tell you what they think is positive and what they think is negative in the current situation. get the whole lot up on the board.
2 Help them re-establish team processes
Health Warning: Never under any circumstances try to suggest that things will be the same as they were before. "Nothing's really changed" "It'll be just like the old days" are not true, don't help and simply destroy your credibility.
Health Warning 2: Don't give them your prescription of how things should work; a high-performance team creates its own rules and you have a unique opportunity here to help them do that from scratch.
It's far easier to have people accepting change and finding new, better ways of working together if they're already out of their comfort zone than two years ago when everything was sunny and everyone was complacent.
Put your flipchart sheet up on the wall with all the stuff that they've told you; now get them working on the really big questions:
- who does what,
- how people should interact,
- how decisions get made and
- how things get done.
This is what we call Real Teambuilding - the team building itself under our facilitation. At its best, it's as much fun as a social event, and more productive than a team meeting.
All the best,
Dave Bull
Team Coaching Network Ltd - http://www.teamcoachingnetwork.com
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