Last week I was reading a discussion thread somewhere about good and bad ways for companies to handle layoffs. There were a number of horror stories -- one involving a poor woman who was told in front of all of her colleagues that she was being laid off, after which people in the room were encourage to chime in as to why.
The comment that stuck with me, however, came from a reader who said layoffs should never be done in phases. Rather, they should be done all at once, thus averting the kind of morale and productivity crisis that impending doom can bring.
I agree completely. Nothing could be more debilitating to a workforce than to know with certainty that the ax will fall again. That's why I hope Yahoo's
recently announced layoffs aren't merely part of an installment plan. The year's been bad enough for employees of the troubled search/content company.
Also, call me crazy, but I think it'd be a good gesture if departing CEO Jerry Yang, who reported the 1,500 layoffs (10 percent of the workforce) in a corporate blog post titled,
Tough Times, declined to take a salary during the rest of his tenure at the company he co-founded. It's not like he can't afford it.
Update: Call me uninformed. A reader informs me that Jerry Yang has an annual salary of $1. Nice to see that he's already made the good gesture.
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