Hi. I'm Candice Elliott, and I am a human resources strategist. Today we are going to be talking about making the decision to do a layoff. We're not talking about a termination, just one person, we're talking about a layoff. A layoff is when you decide that you were no longer going to be employing categories of staff. That could be all of a particular position, or all of a particular department, or all of your people who have worked less than X number of years, or some objective standard. It's really important that when you're doing a layoff, that you do use an objective standard for who you are laying off and that objective standard must not be a discriminatory standard. You want to choose, like I said, categories of staff, so positions, a length of time with the organization, a department, part-time staff, full-time staff, some objective category like that and not just pick out 10 random people from the group that you're deciding to let go unless you're going to go into real detailed documentation about why those are the right positions to be letting go. In a layoff, you're really ending positions rather than ending the employment of a particular person.
That's a distinction to keep in mind. It's that there is no longer funding for the position anymore. Layoffs are really tough. I've assisted with probably a hundred layoffs. Many of them [00:02:00] before and around and just after the Corona virus. Making the decision to do a layoff is a really difficult decision. It helps to have the most data that you can have and data about labor costs, data about sales and product sales and forecasting for future revenue, future expenditures so that you can decide whether not a layoff is the right way to go. Once you've made the decision to layoff, there are a lot of ways to go about actually performing the layoff and noticing the employees to the layoff. I'm not going to get into all of the particular legal requirements of doing a layoff.
Generally, what you do is that you decide who you're laying off. You either decide to talk with them all as a group or talk with them individually. If you're talking with people individually, I generally recommend talking to them as soon as possible so that you're talking with each of them in close time proximity to each other so that it's not like you talk to one person then five days later you talked to another and then five days later you talk to another. It's better to just get it all done right at one time because even if information is meant to be confidential, it gets out and people talk and if you're doing one and then another and then another and then another over a longer period of time, it will have more of a detrimental [00:04:00] effect on the rest of your staff.
If you just do them all at once and then you come back to the staff and say, "We've made some layoffs. We're confident that this is the right decision for the company at this time." You refocus them on the mission of the organization and the goals moving forward. Then you say you're available if there are any questions. With the group that has been laid off, you can decide to have as much or as little communication with them as you want to. If you think that it's likely that you may be able to hire them back in the near future, then keeping open channels of communication could be good. If you think that that's unlikely or that feels uncomfortable to you, then you can not. You're not necessarily required to rehire someone that you've ever laid off.
Thank you for joining me if you are considering performing a layoff. I am sorry. I also really respect the decision that you're making to do the layoff. It is a really hard decision to come to. Once you do the layoff, it generally is much better for the organization. When you perform a termination of a person that just wasn't the right fit, it's the same with a layoff. If you don't have the capacity and the resources to support all of those positions, it's better to do the layoff sooner and bring everything back together again and regroup and rethink and then move [00:06:00] forward in a new way. I hope that helps you as you're thinking about this decision if you need to lay off people.
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