Guilt in Downsizing
February 5th, 2009If you need to downsize in your company, you might be interested in TAB President Jason Zickerman’s recent comments featured in Business Week.
Stopping Survivor Guilt
As a senior manager in an era of massive layoffs, it’s your job to stave off survivor guilt before it lowers the morale and productivity of remaining employees
From Guilt to Resentment
Members of the Baby Boom generation on your staff may be particularly vulnerable to the anxieties surrounding layoffs. “Younger people are more comfortable with the idea of people moving around and changing jobs a lot,” says Roy Cohen, a career counselor and executive coach based in New York City. “But baby boomers have the idea that you’re supposed to stay in the same place.”
So why do surviving employees, with their newly enlarged workloads, spend their time feeling guilty about layoffs they had no hand in perpetrating? “It’s not a rational reaction, but it’s only human to think ‘Why them? Why not me?’ ” says Spanier. “They feel sympathetic toward the people who lost their jobs and worry about their well-being, their economic situation.” Wikipedia defines survivor guilt in general as “a mental condition that occurs when a person perceives himself or herself to have done wrong by surviving a traumatic event.”
As an adjunct to the sympathy they feel for laid-off co-workers, employees go through three self-centered stages, says Jason Zickerman, president of the Alternative Board, an executive consulting firm based in Denver.
1. Whew! I made the cut.
2. I have to do all this work.
3. They don’t appreciate me.
“You’ll see changes in personality. Outgoing people now being silent. Work isn’t as good, and absenteeism rises,” he advised. “There’s anxiety and pressure, the beginning of depression in the case of some. For employees, layoffs are not in their control, and whenever someone else is holding the puppet strings, it’s stressful.”
Soon, the business itself can feel the effects of survivor’s guilt on its bottom line. Fortunately, business consultants say, survivor’s guilt is highly responsive to treatment if senior management acts early and often.
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