It’s been tough to watch the news in the last few weeks. In fact, it’s downright depressing. Company after company, many of them brands that we all know and trust, continue to announce layoffs.
If you really want a dose of despair, you can track the nation’s lay-offs as they happen by checking Layoff Daily. The owners of this site now have to provide updates four to eight times a day to keep up with the news!
If you’re a recruiter or you’re coaching someone, in the near future you’ll probably come in contact with candidates, clients, and potential clients who have been laid-off. Have you ever wondered what goes through the mind of someone in this situation? It might be worth some additional thought.
Over the next few days we’ll be discussing this topic. I’ll start by sharing some recent insight I gained from Malcolm Gladwell’s newest book called Outliers. In this book, Mr. Gladwell tells the story of how Jewish immigrants to New York City in the late 1800s had a profound effect on how a small group of people were able to become wildly successful attorneys in the 1970s. If you’ve read any of Gladwell’s previous books, you know he’s a master at making these odd connections.
During the development of this story, he makes an interesting observation. Jewish immigrants who came to New York City were extremely hard workers. They commonly worked in the garment industry and would put in 100 hour work weeks.
“When [the main character in the story] came home at night to his children, he may have been tired and poor and overwhelmed, but he was alive. He was his own boss. He was responsible for his own decisions and direction. His work was complex: it engaged his mind and imagination. And in his work, there was a relationship between effort and reward… Those three things—autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward—are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have to be satisfying. Work that fulfills these three criteria is meaningful. ”
With these criteria in mind, what happens to a person who has recently been laid-off? Many perceive that two of the three legs to their “stool of meaning at work” have been knocked out from under them.
With a good job, a person has the perception of autonomy. But when a lay-off occurs, that perception is shattered. Self-sufficiency was really “company-sufficiency”, and is no longer available to that person.
In addition, many lay-offs are not performed along the lines of performance alone. A person may be a very high performer and still get laid-off. In the short term, this disrupts the desired connection between effort and reward. To a person going though this experience, it doesn’t seem fair.
If you’re coaching someone, it is important to address these two issues. Helping a person conceptualize how his previous job eventually lost its meaning is an important first step in establishing a new direction.
If you’re a hiring manager interviewing a person who has recently been laid-off, it might be worth probing on these two issues: (1) Can the candidate find autonomy in your organization? and (2) Is there a connection between effort and reward in the position you need filled? While these may not be pertinent issues during the interview (there are a lot of people who are desperate for jobs), they’ll become retention issues at a later time when conditions improve.
