LAYOFF LIST

Reducing the manpower of the organization is one of the steps that companies usually adopt to mitigate COVID-19 impact.

CXOs did well in explaining the necessity of doing such actions for the overall organizations` survival. yet, the bad taste in the mouth will remain there for quite some time.

In this article, I`m trying to cover the subject from a different angel.

How do business leaders select their lay off lists? how confident they are that the selected names are the ones that the organization won`t need soon!

Asking the same question in a different way, are you sure " as a leader" that you kept the right people. what was the selection criteria? how these criteria were validated? what`s the adopted model to forecast the efficiency of the overall organization after removing those calibers?

I have been doing business with companies in different regions, from different sizes across multiple verticals. The extract of my 14 years of exposure is

" measuring & evaluating the employees’ performance is always a challenge "

some CXOs are selecting very complicated modules to manage the performance and they end up measuring nothing as the module itself is not understandable to 80% of their teams.

Others may leave it to the HR departments to design and implement the processes with the department heads. In such module, every department would end up working on different model, which will kill the concept of pushing on the same direction and working for the same objectives.

one of the most successful models I have seen is

" unified performance management algorithm"

• standardizing the performance measurement algorithm. one simple formula that my mom can understand.
• Data science department along with the department heads spend good time to fit this algorithm to each department.
• Explaining the model / algorithm of each department to the HR team.
• CXOs to close the loop with the HR team by doing checking understating exercise. simply, if the HR team successfully taught this model back to the CXOs , this would mean that the model is simple , understandable , implementable and can be audited.
• Finally plot a monthly ranking system for each department using the signed off algorithm. it`s your choice to make this ranking visible to everyone or no.

Then it will be so easy to manage, the promotion, demotion, and even lay off processes.

The future impact will be always visible, and the name selection won`t be biased as every decision will be well calibrated with the overall success formula / recipe the organization decided to adopt.

Of course, there`s no absolute right or wrong in this area. The only way to know if the layoff list had the right names or no is the performance of the organization when the business bounces back. This is going to be the true test.