Workplace trends

I’ve been meaning to plug my friend Lisa Takeuchi Cullen’s new blog: She writes about workplace trends for Time, and that’s also the subject of Work In Progress. Probably the recently announced layoffs at Time Inc. aren’t the hook that she and her colleagues were hoping for, but so it goes. She addressed that news in a recent post. Some excerpts:

Not surprisingly, layoffs have a staggering effect not just on the laid off but on everybody in the workplace. It affects our performance (just count all the tired old metaphors I’ve used so far in this posting). It affects our families (my husband jokes that his nascent small business will provide us with all the instrument cases we can eat). It knocks about our emotional equilibrium, hobbles our confidence, widens our chasm of self doubt….

The remaining workers–the so-called survivors–suffer too. They can experience decreased productivity, increased stress, depression, anxiety, lowered morale and job dissatisfaction. A decrease in organizational commitment–loyalty to the employer–is common, adds [management professor Rainer] Seitz. “There’s also survivor guilt: Why was I spared?”

Research has found that the manner in which a layoff occurs can rile workers just as much, if not more than, the actual firing. For instance, a lack of advance notice can really rub workers the wrong way. Failing to adequately and thoroughly explain the reason for the job elimination–even if it’s a macro reason like an industry downturn–can also tick us off.

She concludes with links to a variety of layoff-related material. Here’s the whole post. The blog will likely be interesting to follow in the weeks ahead, as the layoffs play out — even if this isn’t quite the workplace trend Lisa wanted to be thinking about quite so much.