Why do you lose 10% of your top performers?
Some percentage of top performers report to deadbeat managers, so in an environment doing mandatory layoffs, they'll know that it doesn't matter how much they knock it out of the park, their manager will screw them. So of course they'll leave.
I read posts here all the time about how hard it is to hire. How do top performers distinguish themselves as they go out for new jobs? When did this become easy?
During an interview process, and by using your network. Top performers aren't usually slinging applications through LinkedIn in my limited experience
> When did this become easy? It isn't, they're referred to as top performers for a reason. It's easier for folks who excel in their fields, and that holds true across domains.
In most cases, someone you worked with before who liked working with you suggests to their employer or someone in their professional network they hire you. Could be an old classmate, coworker, open source collaborator, even someone you know through a hobby.
The top people have the best opportunities elsewhere, so they leave first.
Even if they don't quit outright, they are likely to quiet quit, because why put in the effort when it is rewarded with disloyalty?
Though I've never personally been laid off, it's a black mark on the company that I think you can never recover from. It means I will never trust anything said at a quarterly all-hands. The projections they give us employees are spun to be more positive than they really are.
During COVID, my company told us that we were going to be able to save money by breaking the lease on our office building and stop paying for amenities like the snacks in the break room and catered lunches (since nobody could use them anyways). This, they said, should save us enough money that we don't need to lay anyone off!
10% of the company was laid off a week later. The next day, I would later discover, the company applied for a PPP loan: they had laid people off pre-emptively so that they wouldn't be penalized for it next year when they sought to have their PPP loan forgiven.
It illustrated to me that you can't trust leadership, ever. Once a company initiates a layoff, it's a permanent black mark on that company
This all sounds like a hand wavy hypothetical.
But lying off isn’t firing someone for performance - it’s admitting “we don’t have enough money to pay you”
And that’s something that should be scary to everybody in the company.
When your shitty coworker gets fired, you shrug and say, yeah, saw that coming. When your shitty coworkers get laid off, you look around nervously and think phew, l lucked out.
It gutted moral, basically.