These are unusual times — few of us have ever seen anything like this. You have a job now, but you're concerned about possible layoffs, and you want to reduce the chances of being laid off. Many career strategies of long standing no longer apply. For instance, a job with room for advancement might have been attractive a year ago, but a very secure job might be more attractive now.
To keep your job, when many others are losing theirs, recognize first that you aren't the only one thinking this way. Many of your colleagues are hitting Google looking for "how to avoid a layoff". Many are already applying what they've learned.
We've already examined tactics for stabilizing your own frame of mind and strengthening your relationships. Here are some tips for enhancing your relationship to the organization.
- Be irreplaceable
- Normally, being irreplaceable is undesirable, because it reduces the chances of promotion. These aren't normal times. Hang on to assignments that put you in positions the organization cares most about. Strategic importance is less critical than tactical importance.
- Work in the most important business unit
- If things get really bad, entire units — divisions, product lines, locations, subsidiaries — will be sold or closed. Being an irreplaceable part of one of those units won't matter.
- Work in a stable line of business
- Some companies serve multiple markets. The more stable the market, the safer you are. For instance, in advertising, serving the automotive market is riskier than serving health care.
- Skill up
- Acquire any skills, knowledge, or experience that would enable you to take on some of the responsibilities of a co-worker. If you already have such skills, make certain that the right people know. These skills will enable you to take on the duties of that co-worker after the layoff. Not having them makes you more eligible for layoff than someone else who has both those skills and yours.
- Tactfully decline re-assignment
- Unless a re-assignment puts you in a more secure position, you'll be the newbie when you get there. Newbies are more vulnerable to layoffs.
- Hang on to assignments
that put you in positions
the organization cares
most about - Be alert to high-level personnel changes
- Any change in personnel in your upward report chain could be significant for you. When you hear of a change or potential change, learn why it might be happening and what the consequences might be. Prepare yourself.
- Set Google alerts on your company and your report chain
- Google alerts can provide information about conditions and rumors long before any concrete events, by automatically sending you email when Google finds a hit that matches a search string you define. You can specialize to news. By setting alerts for your organization name and the names of people in your report chain, you can be tuned in to changes that might affect your position.
There are no guarantees — layoffs might eventually affect you. What to do then? A topic for another time. First in this series Top Next Issue
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Related articles
More articles on Workplace Politics:
- Top Ten Signs of a Blaming Culture
- The quality of an organization's culture is the key to high performance. An organization with a blaming
culture can't perform at a high level, because its people can't take reasonable risks. How can you tell
whether you work in a blaming culture?
- Devious Political Tactics: Divide and Conquer, Part I
- While most leaders try to achieve organizational unity, some do use divisive tactics to maintain control,
or to elevate performance by fostering competition. Understanding the risks of these tactics can motivate
you to find another way.
- Holding Back: II
- Members of high-performing teams rarely hold back effort. But truly high performance is rare in teams.
Here is Part II of our exploration of mechanisms that account for team members' holding back effort
they could contribute.
- Gratuitous Complexity as a Type III Error
- Some of the technological assets we build — whether hardware, software, or procedures —
are gratuitously complex. That's an error, but an error of a special kind: it can be the correct solution
to the wrong problem.
- Cassandra at Work
- When a team makes a wrong choice, and only a tiny minority advocated for what turned out to have been
the right choice, trouble can arise when the error at last becomes evident. Maintaining team cohesion
can be a difficult challenge for team leaders.
See also Workplace Politics and Managing Your Boss for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
- Coming May 15: Should I Write or Should I Call?
- After we recognize the need to contact a colleague or colleagues to work out a way to move forward, we next must decide how to make contact. Phone? Videoconference? Text message? There are some simple criteria that can help with such decisions. Available here and by RSS on May 15.
- And on May 22: Rescheduling Collaborative Work
- Rescheduling is what we do when the schedule we have now is so desperately unachievable that we must let go of it because when we look at it we can no longer decide whether to laugh or cry. The fear is that the new schedule might come to the same end. Available here and by RSS on May 22.
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Beware any resource that speaks of "winning" at workplace politics or "defeating" it. You can benefit or not, but there is no score-keeping, and it isn't a game.
- Wikipedia has a nice article with a list of additional resources
- Some public libraries offer collections. Here's an example from Saskatoon.
- Check my own links collection
- LinkedIn's Office Politics discussion group