Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Blogging on Layoffs

Today at work, we started blogging on what it means to be laid off. We have some 900 layoffs coming, beginning in late August, and there hasn't been much communication while the process is underway. We have a lot of younger employees who've never been through this before, and anxiety is running high.

So I blogged my own layoff 10 years ago. We posted it on our intranet. The response has been amazing -- the blog post clearly touched a chord with a lot of people. I've gotten emails and phone calls, and vague reports of the post "going viral" in parts of the company.

Standard operating procedure is don't talk about it. We're trying something different.

The first post was about what happened. Next will be questions you get from family and friends. Then we'll have a post by someone who went through the process but didn't get laid off. And then one on why networking is so important, and all of the various ways it's done today.

I'll provide an update on what happens.

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