Company exits - gruesome or humane?
Poornima Mohandas -
Tuesday, July 22, 2008 1:05 PM
Only a small fragment of the Indian corporate world practices outplacement. The rest don’t even know of it! The concept is so rare that when I brought it up with a recruiter, she asked me candidly, “What is outplacement? Is it when we place a candidate abroad?” (Outplacement is the service by which a company that retrenches employees helps them find another job. Read more on it here
While researching for the above story, I asked a manager why his start up carried out outplacement for his staff when the office shut down in Bangalore. Pensively he said, “It wasn’t always like this…” He narrated the following incident: The first time I laid off people was in another start up some years back at a regular Friday afternoon meeting by giving each of the 11 employees their severance packages. Emotional outbursts followed. I was pretty immune to all this as I was a U.S. returnee, used to the hire and fire culture. But one employee came up to me and said, “If my scooter doesn’t go out of my house everyday, my neighbours will ask me what happened. Can I at least come to office, I won’t do anything, but I just want to come here till I find another job.” This changed everything for me. In the U.S you don’t know your neighbours or even if you do they don’t care. Things are different in India, lay offs always has a big social consequence. From then on unless lay offs are done humanely I have refused to be part of it. That was his story, which he narrated with pain in his voice. This moved me much.
On the other end of the spectrum, I have heard horrific stories of employees being shown the door soon after they walk into office with no prior warning whatsoever. The manager calls the employee into a room, delivers the message of lay off and waits for two minutes for the message to sink. The employee may have various questions, some of which his/her manager is approved to answer. In most cases the employee is asked to resign, this way the company saves on the severance package and smartly circumvents bad press. Soon after, the employee, escorted by security personnel, is taken to his workstation so that he can gather his papers and personal belongings. I cannot even begin to comprehend the trauma of being watched at your own desk and then to be forcibly escorted out. These are the kind of stories doing the rounds in the work environs today. If you have experienced or have heard of such incidents that you wish to share, feel free to use this as a forum.