Leadership Coach Near Me: Part 3 – Dealing with Layoffs
I think the the first thing, on a more short‑term basis, is: should I be, should I be sending my employees home? Should I be temporarily laying employees off? Now, of course, this is just within the Canadian jurisdictions and provinces. Remember, laying your employees off on a temporary basis, bis, is not necessarily something you want to do. You certainly want to seek legal counsel—whether it’s an employment contract, whether you have a contract with your employee in terms of working conditions. You want to make sure that conditions of employment are there before you temporarily lay anybody off, and we don’t want to get into any legal troubles over the long term.
We want to make sure that whoever we lay off, that will, laying them off in good faith. Remember, we, we might want to bring these employees back again, so we want to make sure that they see the business in good light and we can bring them back, and when we get going again and when we recover, we’re in a strong position as a business and employee team to, to recover effectively.
Who Do You Layoff In Your Company?
The other consideration as well is: well, the employees that I do have to say goodbye to are typically the high‑priced employees. This is not always the case, because remember, your high‑priced employees are, are typically your high‑skilled employees, and the employees, a critical employee, your skill set, you want to, you want to retain, are those employees that are going to give you the biggest bang for your buck. In terms of biggest bang for your buck right now, you want to make sure that whatever effort or activity you put in your business, in terms of serving clientele or customers—whatever the case may be—is it the best you can possibly do, the most efficient and the most expedient way you can do it in your business?
Remember, at this stage in the game, especially through crisis, is it’s all about press tracking and preserving cash. It’s not necessarily about growing cash Revenue. If you can, bonus; if not, let’s make sure that, that we can look at that and make sure that we can manage and track this cash appropriately.
Any last thoughts on, when you have these business owners between the 1 to 50 million, any Sage advice you give them on regards to their mindset to automatically start laying off people—their ramifications short‑term, long term—that you like to put out in front of them, they make them, you know, put top of mind before they make those decisions?
Business Owners Can Turn to Experts at Workplaces to Help
Yeah, absolutely. Typically business—and I am broad brushing, I mean, there, not everybody does this—but typically when we find ourselves in a crisis, we, we react emotionally. And humans, at the end of the day, regardless of level in organization and whether you’re the CEO, the owner of the business, you’re going to react emotionally, and the first thing is: lay off non‑essentials. Non‑essentials could be, be marketing; it could be HR; it could be IT. Keep in mind that these traditionally non‑essentials are typically those Essentials that are absolutely critical when you start up again.
Businesses of that size typically take a broad based approach in terms of layoff—so, you know, we take the, we take the good old 10%: well, we’ve got to do this. Remember to have a critical look at who you’re laying off. Remember, skill set in human capital is the only growing Capital asset you’re having a business. Make sure you’ve got a plan.
But also, in terms of cash, before we do a generalized layoff and restructuring, have a good look, forecast—you know, talk, talk about dry run, talk about these systems of forecasting cash flow. What is the cash flow going to look like with our current circumstance, and, as best as we can do, forecast it out to see what the implications are? Once you know that and you’re relatively certain and, and confident with that, then decide what you need to lay off, regardless of whether it’s a human layoff or other non‑human associated assets that you have in your business right now.