I was recently reading a favorite blog of mine, http://future-of-work.spaces.live.com/blog/. In his July 17 post, Dan Rasmus commented on ways to keep your workforce engaged. A few of his comments resonated with me as I have seen so many of the organizations I work with face difficult layoff decisions.

“…we need to think more deeply about what drives innovation, what keeps customers coming back, what helps other employees engage and what actually makes a plan, a project or a task execute well within the organization. The answer to all of those..start with people, and when networks breakdown during layoffs…The structure of the firm changes when people leave. Social connections become lost. Confidences and communications become frayed. Edges of the organization lose their sharpness, they blur as they scramble to replace what is lost, and all of that increases friction, further degrading moral and reinforcing disengagement.”

At worst, organizations are laying off a straight percentage from their workforce regardless of role or criticality to current and future business priorities. Others are using more precision in identifying where there is opportunity to cut labor costs without impacting their long term strategies. That precision is achieved by aligning skills and roles with the overall future needs of an organization, i.e. Strategic Workforce Planning. Workforce Planning is not about a person. It is not succession planning. But what Dan brings into play is the immediacy in structural decay that can happen if social connections are fractured or dissolved. The remaining workforce is exposed and vulnerable and prone to disengagement. And it is that very disengagement that translates into potential lowered productivity, profitability, increased high performer turnover and other such key indicators organizations assess the health of their business by. We cannot always avoid layoffs within our business. But what we can do is be honest with our employees about the decisions that have to be made. We can explain the vision of the business and why they are essential to making it happen. In other words, we can be as engaged with them as we hope them to be with our business.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 3rd, 2009 at 10:26 pm and is filed under HCM, HR Metrics, Human Capital, Skills Shortage, Workforce Planning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.