Value-Aligned Transition Process
While the realities of business necessitate taking tough decisions to ensure survival, the gut-wrenching actions need to be designed and executed in a balanced, thoughtful, and planful manner to maintain your Corporate Brand and retain employee loyalty. Living your organizational values during tough times is an imperative as employees who are asked to transition, and those who survive the severance, experience the process of separation at both practical and psychological/emotional levels.
Providing appropriate support for leaders in transition is imperative as these transitions are highly visible, internally and externally and in turn represent both threats and opportunities to both retain and potentially enhance your Brand.
What do they say when they leave?
Those who leave will have mixed emotions and thoughts and will undoubtedly share these in the marketplace and with those who are retained inside your organization. If supported through a fair process that takes into account their personal, emotional and practical needs, they will take greater measure to ensure the smooth transition of their work and network, including relationships with the employees who stay and your key customers.
Key considerations for Senior Leaders who execute force reductions include:
Begin with this question? What if it was me, how would I feel and what would I expect to know and experience?
"Measure Twice, Cut Once:" Hold in balance what is required by the law and the administrative process with what is required by the values and culture. Seek and find creative solutions that provide greater options to achieve resolutions that strike the right balance.
Design the implementation of the restructuring or right-sizing process that results in a reduction in force in a thoughtful and planful manner with inputs from Legal, HR, and Organizational development experts.
Ensure that your communication and employee engagement strategy is thought through, even if this means the need to delay the action by a week or two to get it right.
Think ahead for how to message, engage, and communicate the case to the organization and market.
Coach senior leaders for how to share the rationale for the decision to the organization as a key background context ahead of communications with each effected employee. Ensure that this rationale is clearly linked to the organization's vision and values. This is an essential backdrop within which individual communications can be reasonably held, positioned, and contextualized.
Ensure that enough time is given for each person to understand and process the decision with sufficient attention paid to their practical and emotional needs.
Provide needed support to those effected and those who survive to ensure a smooth transition, inclusive of EAPs and outplacement services.
This unprecedented time has emerged very quickly to threaten the survival of organizations and individuals. Those who are asked to leave are being told to leave at a time where they are already anxious, overwhelmed, and fearful given the reality of the current threats to themselves, their families, and the communities.
Those who are treated in a kind, thoughtful, and engaging manner are more likely to weather the storm with less pain and suffering. They will more likely feel respected, appreciated, and supported by the organization that had to "let them go," and the marketplace will get to hear a balanced story.
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