Executive Summary
Work atmosphere is an important aspect when analyzing working conditions of a company. Positive business culture can correlate with effective and efficient productivity, thus leading to an organizations’ financial success. Unfortunately, there are times when management must lay off fellow employees due to economics and financial reasoning. These actions are faced with dire consequences. The following report includes expected reactions by employees who continue to work within an organization after a company downsizing. The report is further directed towards management efforts to repair the torn work atmosphere, as it includes cases that both convey ineffective downsizing practices and outline successful downsizing
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The main objective of this report is to educate management about the effects of survivor syndrome, and allow them to formulate a plan to reduce them whenever organizational downsizing is necessary. This report is not providing alternatives or analyzing the ethical issues behind downsizing; rather we are giving insight on how to deal with the effects of downsizing from a managerial standpoint. However, when assessing this report, we must keep in mind that statistics vary by the industry, and the size of a company. Statistics also vary by an organization’s business culture, which consists of employee norms for expected social behavior (Appelbaum & Close, 1999). Furthermore, it’s difficult to adequately measure employee’s perceived emotions from surveys, as often respondents of surveys only reveal what they want you to know.
Databases and Sources
This report’s resources include academic articles written by Dr. Steven H. Appelbaum. Dr. Appelbaum is a professor at Concordia University, and has won numerous awards writing articles regarding organizational restructuring. Appelbaum’s articles discussing survivor syndrome are well-known and commonly cited by researchers to support evidence in other articles. This report also integrates the organizational downsizing opinions of Dr. Shreekumar Nair, a professor at the National Institute of Industrial Engineering. His
Butcher, D. (2008, November 13). 5 Strategies for managing employees after layoffs. Industry market trends. Industry market trends rss. Retrieved from http://news.thomasnet.com/IMT/2008/11/13/5-strategies-for-employers-managing-surviving-employees-after-layoffs/
The GM organization has been described as an organization with great culture crisis, the story in the study screams culture problems in the organization where employees are fired, many policy and procedures changes at without prior notice to them. Culture encompasses all the values and behaviors that constitute to a unique socialization which is a component of a healthy working environment for employees (Fullan, M. (2001). Culture greatly influences the organization 's output and performance; it as well provides better guidelines on customer care and service in addition to the concern for the environment.
The “lean and mean” organization resulting from downsizing has given way to emerging management concepts such as employee empowerment and self-managed work teams. These characteristics of the current workplace, in combination with a rise in the use of contingent labour, signify a serious cultural shift away from the traditional “pre-downsizing-era” workplace. Hierarchical, bureaucratic organizations which offered employment for life
Layoffs are not always the best solution for a decline in company profits. A business must resolve the conflict that exists between their responsibility to meet economic targets and the ethical responsibility of non-maleficence. Furthermore, it must be determined if the layoffs would even maximize stakeholder welfare from a utilitarian perspective (Arce & Xin Li, 2011).
At a time when many companies experience a difficult economic situation, they have to cut costs by laying off workers, and worse if your employees decided to leave for other competitors. Losing a talented worker is costly and to replace your top employee’s knowledge, experience and customer relationships is not something as simple as ones might think. So why do good employees quit? Even with high wages or great benefit, employees can still depart from the company if they do not get along well with their managers. So in order to keep good employees on board, the managers play an important role in knowing and matching their workers’ needs. In what follows, I going to analyze the case study: “Why are we losing all our good people?” which is about a fictional firm called “Sambian Partners”; what's really the reasons that is driving talented people out of the company and offering some solution to help Sambian stop the talent drain.
The effect of mismanaged LAYOFFs on the remaining workforce and the effects, lack of management preparation, the human condition, and lack of mitigation strategies. We think that the problem with this article is that not enough managers or HR personal, know how to let a person go from their employment effectively. They sometimes don't realize the impact that it has on the other employees morals. Also, that sometimes companies don't take a closer look to make sure downsizing will be the answer to cutting costs like they think that it will. Every HR or manager should be let go in their lifetime so
There are two types of turnover, voluntary turnover happens when the employee makes the decision to leave and involuntary turnover is when employees has no choice in their termination (Schmitz, 2012). Every month or sooner managers experience some of their exceedingly qualified employees leave the company. After realizing that their company is becoming less profitable is when they begin to wonder why and brainstorm on ways to retain them. In Information Technology, “the cost of recruiting new staff is high and the loss of continuity when staff leave can also be very expensive” (Bott, 2005, p. 111). In IT, human resources strive to maintain their highly skilled employees while employees’
Well-functioning organizations usually have quality employees who work hard to accomplish the organizations mission statement and goals. However, organizations on occasions face issues as for retaining these employees, subsequently failing to fill these positions and fulfilling their organizational goals. Due to the importance of retention, organizations may hire industrial/organizational psychologists to resolve retention issues in order to remain competitive in their field. At JC’s Casino, improving retention is an issue not only for the owner but also for the employees as well as the patrons that frequent the casino. The pay is reasonable but employees are still unhappy and resorting to leaving the organization.
The cost of termination and turnover can be devastating for an organization and can be even more devastating for those organization who can’t afford such
For management team or an organization layoff is never easy especially if they are good workers. Nonetheless, sometimes it comes unexpected and the company is beginning to go downhill, as well, cost is becoming a factor. Manager now must determine the hardest decision ever of who they must let go and who they would keep during this process of saving cost for the company. In preparation for this management team must come together in addressing to those employees why they reach the decision, provide solid explanation and have concrete facts to support those decisions. Questions will surely be asked why them or why not transfer them to a different department, managers must be able to address those question with absolutely no problem. Meaning, all their ducks need to be to eliminate any outburst from those employees that is being laid off.
(Sniderman, Bulmash, Nelson & Quick, 2007) Employees in Wal-Mart are disengaged because there are four different types of behavioural responses. The first response is ‘exit’. Most of the people that started working in Wal-Mart at the same time as Claude chose to leave within a year. Apparently, high turnover rates existed in Wal-Mart. Secondly, increased voice, Claude’s co-workers became very vocal and increased their voice by complaining to each other about shifts, management and procedures. Thirdly is a sense of decreased loyalty. Claude and his co-workers reduced their involvement within the work setting. They started to think how much Wal-Mart is worth to them. And finally, a sense of increased neglect develops. Claude began to diminish his level of effort. He didn’t want to ‘go the extra mile’ anymore because his manager’s apathetic attitude. These outcomes definitely caused negative impact on productivity, not to mention resulted in lowering the level of employee’s motivation.
The unemployment level is at an all-time low. The economy is strong. The stock market is breaking new records. Investors are buying stocks by the handful. Corporations are making extremely
Downsizing has become a commonplace strategy for organizations to adopt in an effort to cut costs, eliminate redundancies, and streamline organizational systems. Over the last 15 years, many organizations have engaged in downsizing more than once. Most companies have learned from the mistakes of the past, but some companies are still trying to use the same tactics today that were used in the mid 1980s, that leave employees reeling.
Many companies look to salaries and benefits as the first places to cut back when looking to make changes that involve cost-saving. When this happens, it is inevitable that some employees will leave the company to seek employment elsewhere. The employees that remain, whether they stay voluntarily or because they could not find employment elsewhere, are often resentful. Motivation decreases, taking job performance along with it. Employees lose their company loyalty and may even become angry enough to purposefully sabotage the company.
Downsizing, restructuring, rightsizing, even a term as obscure as census readjustment has been used to describe the plague that has been affecting corporate America for years and has left many of its hardest working employees without work. In the year 2001 we had nearly 1.8 million jub cuts, that’s almost three times as much as the year 2000(Matthew Benz). In the 1990's, one million managers of American corporations with salaries over $40,000 also lost their jobs. In total, Fortune 500 companies have eliminated 4.4 million positions since 1979 including the 65,000 positions cut in February of 2002 (Ellen Florian). Although this downsizing of companies can have many reasons behind it and cannot be