The primary question in RIF preparation is: "who should go?"

• Score and rank of each employee both within their group and in the company at large
• Deep vs. broad skills (you may need people to cover multiple roles)
• Seniority (may or may not matter at your company)
• Dedication (tough times are ahead)
• Flexibility (they may need to stretch [no pun intended] both skills and effort to help your company get by)

You should not wait until you are faced with a RIF to set up a review process. If you haven’t done one by now, get it going immediately. It may not answer all of these questions for you, but it will be a great start. We have ready-made, battle-tested and complimentary process documents and forms to make both the review process and the scoring/ranking process easy for you (it includes compensation calculations as well to give you a full-bodied annual review process – drop us a line and we will get them right to you). Once complete, you will have a far better view of who should go and in what order. In fact, even without a downsizing this process typically lays bare some low-hanging fruit for workforce optimization. You will, of course, need to layer in your considerable judgment and any other pertinent factors as necessary (e.g. discrimination testing, etc.). Don’t forget addition by subtraction. That is when you remove someone and the team’s productivity actually rises with fewer headcount. Work to identify your roadblock employees. They may have served a purpose before, but it’s much harder to rationalize them in this economy.

Determining when and how to let someone go is very much about signaling your behavior to remaining employees. Remaining employees will talk to RIF’d employees – there is no avoiding it. So think about the details. Did you lay people off during Thanksgiving week or did you wait until the first week of December? Did you think about health coverage? Typically it runs through the end of the month in which someone loses their job. Thus, if you let someone go on the 29th they are forced almost immediately to consider COBRA (which has a 60 day lookback, but no one likes being without coverage even when they can get it ex post facto), whether they want it or not, unless your company has alternative continuing benefits. Laying off in the first week of the month leaves the rest of the month to find alternative health coverage and will be considered a benefit to departing employees. Was the severance package fair? Was there severance at all? How you treat employees in a layoff will impact those who remain. Remaining employees who think the company may unceremoniously dump them will be quicker to reach out to their headhunters – and your best employees will be the first to go. However, if you treat departing employees well those still employed will be more inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt and stay to help you through the tough times.

 

What will happen to the employees that stay? Now that you have let some of your workforce go, what will happen to those who stay? Will their workload balloon? There is often some slack that can be picked up but will that cover all of the lost hours? And remember, your best employees already have no slack – that’s part of why they are your best employees. You may need to change goals and processes to get by and reset expectations around pending promotions, raises and the like. Most importantly, communicate expectations clearly to the survivors. Nature abhors a vacuum, so whatever you don’t tell them they will fill in themselves, typically with the most dire assumptions.

 

 

Finally, even with a layoff you may need to fill holes in your team. Perhaps it is a critical piece of the engineering group to push a product out the door, or maybe it’s the accounting manager to take the place of two G&A heads. Identify these holes early and get going on the hires because after a workforce reduction you may not have the ability to turn over work in an orderly fashion.

In summary, with a bit of planning you will be better equipped to let the right people go, keep the remaining employees working productively for you and fill any remaining holes on the team.

 

…This is a high-level discussion of a topical corporate issue. There are many other factors effecting talent management depending on where the company is in its industry, product life cycle, financing life cycle and many other factors. Let someone who has been there be your partner in finding the best fit for your position and your company. ProfessionalSourcing offers full-cycle recruiting services for all of your engineering, accounting and finance personnel needs. Learn more here.