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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2 comments:
Interesting post as ever Dave!
I've been on the other side of this recently, and though there isn't a great deal of our "team" left - I'll admit I hadn't really thought of the "survivors" in terms of how they might feel about all this. Granted, most of the "survivors" are not in the same geographical area as us but none the less many of them know us personally through assignments abroad or from previous internal employment.
Irrespective of that though, in large multinationals which I can account for, these things don't really make a difference. Teams change every week irrespective of layoffs - general departures and arrivals often change the context of teams anyway so why is this so much differnt? Yes there is the friendship and social dynamic associated with these issues that of couse effects overall morale and motivation, but in times where cost reductions are taking place, generally the product or indeed productivity of the team doesn't really seem that important to the employer anyway or least for some "compassionate" reason they cannot be seen to urge the priority of the project when they forcibly or otherwise let staff go. So why bother trying to raise the morale of those that are left in the interim? Things will eventually move on. I appreciate the remainder have to be looked after but why are they deservant of any more special treatment than what they already had? Like you said their confidence in the corporation is shattered and they are all the much more wary as a result. That you cannot change. Things will progress as time allows and as new people, unaware of the history, join things will invariably go back to what is considered "normal".
Sorry for the long comment, but I think as good as your post is, it's merely peacemeal for managers left with grieving employees.
And don't forget managers are people too, and dealing with this sort of thing most of the time requires training way beyond their professional capabilities. It's not an easy time for any of us, and some of the decisions being made recently are purely oppurtunisitic and driven from greed. Motivating the leftovers of a team in this sort of situation is not a task I would wish on anyone, especially when some of those in the team are so dam good, and so highly paid the employer wishes them to leave on their own account and deliberately forfeits on paying them off. Business is a cruel domain!
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Thanks for the comment, Fluffy. I think your point is important, because as soon as something becomes "the right thing to do" then it gets done for the wrong reasons which undermines the whole point of doing it.
Once managers know you've got to be nice to the survivors, HR departments will include so-called teambuilding into the re-organisation budget and survivors will have their guilt at being the lucky ones increased by the fact that the organisation is wasting money on unproductive games.
I also agree that teams change all the time and need to be managed accordingly all the time. The reason I focused on this particular scenario is because it is currently topical. And of course I'm hoping that a manager somewhere will think "This Dave guy seems to know his onions, I'll call him in to sort this out for us."!
And I have no idea why it's "onions" but that's something I've been told in the past!
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