In past layoffs, does anyone come to you with a list of names and you give your feedback on who you can let go? Do they look to performance reviews? Something I was informed of led me to believe that feed back from PL will be applied in this layoff.
9 replies (most recent on top)
@b1 no. I may not have agreed but was always consulted.
@an This is good to know. I am the highest performer on my team by far, and easily in the top 1-2% of performers in my role in the entire department. That's not tooting my own ho-n; the numbers actually show it. So hopefully that counts for something when the layoffs inevitably come.
@a6 When you were a PL, was anyone from your team ever laid off without you being consulted for feedback at all?
@ag Without being too specific, I'm directly aware of targets among my coworkers and peers in other states that equate to 5% to 15% of current staffing. It's different from state to state, department to department. I hear rumors that some states, some departments have higher targets, but don't have direct knowledge.
PL here. Yes, they have a spreadsheet that shows your most recent performance review in one of the columns. They look at everything from your performance to business need to demographics (making sure not to layoff a bunch of people from the same race or age bracket). They absolutely take into account your current and past performance, even though in large layoffs they tell people, "this decision wasn't performance based."
@ac thank you for this. Are you comfortable sharing the targets you’ve heard?
Corporate assigns "savings" targets, which are usually in dollars, not in a particular number of people. That's what happened this time for departments. The layoff planning doesn't necessarily go all the way down to all people leaders. A VP might make all the decisions and not consult the PLs under them.
They are supposed to take into account what the dept. will need after the layoff, critical functions, performance reviews, and each person's likelihood to succeed after the layoff/restructuring. Post-layoff, your department may need a different distribution of skills, and not everyone has the attitude to get through the change and perform.
Real-talk: some of the targets I've heard in my subsidiary are ridiculous, so for some PLs the idea of being able to successfully function after the cuts is not reality-based. But Corp. is firing people who push back too much against d-mb ideas. Corporate is just cutting until they get the profit they want. Ability to be compliant, much less successful, isn't part of the discussion. This makes me think they're trying to sell the company. Cook the books over the short term to look good for a sale.
Sometimes, they'll have a consultant do analysis to identify structural "inefficiencies" like managers with only one direct report, jobs that can be replaced with tech, or inconsistencies between health plans that can be made more efficient, etc. I think this is what's happening with CM / PHCO, but I'm not in that directly.
@OP take my response with a grain of salt as I am not a PL. When our HP went through a merger earlier this year they let people go. It was mentioned by my PL that a spreadsheet was created with our roles and things about us.
as a former people leader that never happened to me.