With Coronavirus now a pandemic, it’s safe to say your company can expect interruptions if it hasn’t already felt them. While some may decide to send employees home to work–and wait out the early stages of this storm–others will have to decide if more drastic steps are in order. I’m talking about layoffs.
It’s worth noting that they should be avoided. Layoffs are expensive and they are only getting more costly. So before you start down that road, answer the following questions:
1. Who makes up your core team?
To keep reading, click here: The Coronavirus Has Been Devastating for Some Companies. 6 Questions to Ask Before You Consider Layoffs
The last one especially, Suzanne. There’s a program called Shared Work that a former employer of mine, a manufacturer, called upon during the Great Recession. They reduced the hours the shop personnel could work, and the rest of the time, they received unemployment compensation. Because the work they did was skilled, once they were trained, it would have cost a lot more to replace them. It much saved the company from having to lay anyone off permanently during that time.
I’m not sure if every state has it, or how it’s set up, but it’s worth looking into.
We had something like that in California in the 80s. We were furloughed every other Friday and the company filed for unemployment for all of us. The result was that without any paperwork on the employees’ part, we worked 9 days in 10, got three day weekends every other week, and saw very little reduction in pay. What a way to make sure that happy, loyal, experienced employees stick around.
Hopefully, the regulations that delay receiving unemployment benefits are loosen up enough to cover the layoffs period of time for this crisis with the coronavirus. Again it depends on the geographical location. But the company should make these layoffs as painless as possible for the employees whom they have to by financial necessity temporarily layoff.
I think it would be better to first try suspending workers for as long as possible and let a layoff be a last resort. Avoid the work of bringing people back. Use web calls to facilitate what you can. Also a great time to train employees online from home, update disaster recovery procedures, and so some spring cleaning of your files, paper and electronic.