If first round of job cuts aren’t deep enough, there may be a second shoe.
We are experiencing (as predicted earlier) another larger than last month set of job losses. Companies have come back from the holidays and enacted reductions that were on the drawing board but were held off until the New Year.
We’re also beginning to see second rounds of cuts from companies that made modest reductions late last year and are having to now drop a “second shoe.” Unless there has been very transparent communication that a secondary reduction would have to happen if certain metrics were not achieved, multiple rounds of layoffs is the worst thing that can happen for morale and management credibility.
Unfortunately, I have been at the planning helm of multiple layoff actions within my career (the darkest days and the most shameful moments of my career) and each time that the conversations and analysis was happening about how deep the cuts should be, I was the one who said, “cut deep enough now that we don’t have to come back later”. My experience says that any percentage cut of less than 10% becomes nothing more than cosmetic. The truth is that there is at ...
