"Survivor syndrome" evolves over three critical phases: strategic decision-making, survivor perception and survivor reaction.
"The downsizing action itself pits a management team's interests against employees' interests - essentially promoting an 'us against them' atmosphere," says Stephanie Creary, Research Associate in Human Capital at The Conference Board, and author of the report. "Survivors will perceive the layoffs as either fair or unfair based on the extent to which they believe the decision to layoff employees was either strategic or impulsive."
Three variables related to the actions of the management team - communication, transparency and trust - may influence whether a layoff survivor will perceive the downsizing as strategic (fair) or impulsive (unfair) and whether survivor syndrome will be perpetuated. Rumors and gossip often arise when communication, transparency and trust are inadequate.
GETTING BACK TO WORK
Unfortunately, downsizing often expands layoff survivors' responsibilities and workloads and gives them the impression that they are expected to do more with less. So getting back to work becomes a much more difficult task because perceptions of employer loyalty are shaken. For these reasons, job involvement tends to actually decrease over time following a downsizing, which supports the notion that waiting for time to ease the pain is simply not effective.
"Management needs to realize that successfully managing 'survivor syndrome' is not simply about making employees happy," says Creary. "It is about taking a strategic approach before, during, and after the downsizing so management teams will be able to extract greater employee motivation, engagement and productivity, and foster the performance of the business over the long term."
To survive corporate downsizing, companies can leverage existing people strategies, including internal communications such as blogs, staff meetings, brown bag lunches, etc. They can also provide learning opportunities such as additional training and staff development initiatives to facilitate job changes and career path transitions resulting from the downsizing. Companies can involve downsizing agents in the decision-making process whenever possible, ensuring that they have the information needed to counsel survivors. They can also provide opportunities and resources for downsizing agents to debrief with other downsizing agents, and they can encourage them to participate in organization-wide stress management initiatives.
"Ultimately, the ability of a company to survive downsizing will depend not only on the processes that are used in execution, but also on the level of commitment that the management team has to reengaging employees at all levels," concludes Creary.
