So about all the cryptic wailing and gnashing of teeth here of late

About three weeks ago, I was informed that, due to business conditions, we were going to have to lay off some folks.  I was asked to update a rating of the folks in my department, and note potential candidate positions to be terminated.

(Just to jump to the end for one thing — my job is safe for the nonce. That’s not what this post is about.)

This wasn’t a huge surprise at this point — it’s very tight business climate, and we’d had to make some tough calls on our budget for our fiscal year, given that we in IT are an overhead cost. We knew our internal customers in other overhead groups were facing significant labor budget cuts; we’d hoped we’d dodged the bullet, but weren’t hugely surprised to hear that wasn’t the case.

I’ve always hated these sorts of activities.  I gallows-humor joke with my direct managers that it’s the one place where we really earn our fabulous paychecks, because telling people you’re going to have to let them go is the hardest thing we do in our jobs; it’s hard even if it’s for performance reasons, and it’s even worse when it has nothing to do with the value of the employee, but “just” to meet a budget number.

(Note: I’m not actually questioning the need here.  I know my company manages money tightly and pessimistically.  Our commodity is billable hours for professional services.  Companies in our line who maintain too many folks on overhead — whether project staff who don’t have billable projects to work on, or overhead staff like in, well, IT — go broke. Which doesn’t help anyone.  Bottom line is … well, is the bottom line.

So I went through the exercise. I have five direct report managers (all worth their weight in gold — they do the real work around here), and 22 staff under them.  So I flagged three of the staff positions as possible to eliminate.

(We always look at these things in terms of positions being ended, not employees being fired — it’s not getting rid of people for performance problems, though clearly if there are performance problem people whose positions are dispensable, they’re usually first on the list.  But nobody is actually being laid off because of performance, otherwise they’d have been explicitly let go because of performance earlier.)

(We also don’t say “layoffs.”  It’s “a reduction in force” in HR-speak, acronymed as “RIF.”  RIF can be a noun, but we also use it as a verb, e.g., “He’s being RIFfed.”  It also bears an unfortunate resemblance to “RIP.”)

So I flagged three, and mentally flagged two more as “if things get really desperate” positions, but didn’t expect it to go there.  We’ve done this sort of exercise in the past, and it’s usually been held to 1-2 people, tops, for my group.

I got the word back that I needed to identify 9 candidates, though it might turn out less than that once the overall resulting budget numbers were crunched.

That’s 9 out of 22 staff.

From a functional standpoint, that’s devastating.  That’s not cutting fat, that’s not even cutting muscle; that’s hacking into the bone and scooping out marrow.

From a personal standpoint, that’s also devastating.  That’s nine people I had to choose to be let go, nine colleagues who work for me I had to give the axe.

Now, I don’t for a moment pretend that it’s equally bad to be the lay-offer and the lay-offee.  But any manager worth his or her salt does not enjoy, or treat casually, letting people go.  Each one is a kick in the gut — in a way all the worse for knowing that for that person, it’s much worse than a kick in the gut.

I have a somewhat Medieval view of employment — or maybe it’s more properly Feudal.  From my team, I expect loyalty, diligence, hard work, honorable service.  That’s what I try to give to my boss.  In return, I offer them protection, appreciation, reward, advancement, respect and a paycheck.  My obligations to my team are just as binding as theirs to me.

One of the reasons RIFs hurt is not just the breaking of the professional and personal ties, or the emotional pain of actually having to break the bad news, but the very real sense that I have failed in my obligations.  (And, yes, I know I also have an obligation upwards that compels me to do so, but that doesn’t make it easier.)  And it’s a failure both to staff further down the org and to my direct reports for putting them through the pain of executing a RIF.

So after I’d put together the hit list — which involved a lot of soul searching as to the individuals on it, as well as the client impact — I submitted it upward, and thence followed further debate and discussion with management, and delays while numbers were further crunched, and so on and so forth.  And, of course, there’s the frustration of seeing people reduced to an evaluation of their utility and their budgetary value, while realizing that, in context of employment, that’s a lot of what they actually represent, and the danger is when you realize that you’re simply looking at them as numbers on a spreadsheet.

And then there were the cusp calls — X or Y?  Who knows what?  Which person has the most long-term prospects?  Which has knowledge that can’t be easily transferred or done without?  Whose lost will have the most impact on what we do and on his/her fellow team members and manager?

And, of course, if you’re a human being there are human factors.  Knowing someone is a single parent, or just got married, or their spouse is out of work, or they rely on the company’s insurance.  You cannot legally or professionally let those sorts of things play a role in the decision, but you can’t help but know how they will make the decision hit harder.

So that went on for a while, and was one of those things that every day brought the subject back up again.  And, meanwhile, I’m having discussions with my managers about plans and what’s coming up and how different folks are performing and all.  And I’m not allowed to bring them into the secret yet for a variety of reasons — so I end up in a dozen conversations lying by (mostly) omission (e.g., “Fred’s really doing great on that assignment.” “Great to hear [if only I didn’t know that Fred’s on the hit list].”)

The final decision on the on the list was due on a Monday, and I scheduled something with my directs the following morning, to give them a full heads up. I outlined my speech, which is something I almost never do, and did up an org chart showing where the cuts were going to be.

Yeah, that didn’t go over well. Even though the final number had come to 7, that meant a third of the staff were being let go. As it worked out, every one of my managers had 1-2 people on their teams.

The rest of the week (last week) was taken up with discussions and coordination with HR as to when and how this would all be done. HR sprung on us a need to do some comparative analysis worksheets to get Legal’s blessing that we were acting properly in terms of who was being let go vs. the positions being eliminated. I was working with HR managers in five locations, and variations in circumstances meant I was working on this until late that Friday (which meant that I couldn’t actually get stuff scheduled for this week, or let my managers know the specifics on some stuff; it also meant I got to go through the exercise of justifying the individuals selected one more time.

That was even hairier for the UK folks, which have much greater process restrictions and formal this-and-that around “redundancies.” We had to scramble to fill out the paperwork so that notifications of all threatened individuals could be made, so that we could then go through a long formal exercise that ultimately justified our choices. That took up good chunks of Monday and Tuesday this week.

This week being the week that notices were given out — generally with a sit-down meeting between the individual involved, a local HR rep, a local IT manager, and the person’s manager (since only one of my directs was in an office where a RIF was taking place) dialed in by phone.

This was the first time doing this for some of my directs. But even experienced hands don’t like telling a colleague, an employee, someone they’ve worked with for years, someone they’ve cracked jokes with and done development plans with and bitched about stuff with and spent hours with in some fashion or another, that that relationship is ending in two weeks.

I only sat in — led, in fact — one of these notification meetings (my direct report manager in question used the lame excuse, so to speak, of having torn out his knee the day before and having to get an MRI done), and that was no less harrowing for it going well. But working with my managers, every one of them was deeply, deeply unhappy about doing this — which made me no less unhappy.

So the last person in my group to be notified was notified this afternoon. Most of the reactions received were quiet and stunned, though I’m sure at will change over time in different ways. And that notification having been given, I feel free to speak (relatively) openly about it, on the off chance that someone in my group has quietly found this blog.

It’s been a very difficult three weeks for me — knowing and not being able to share (except with Margie), planning and counter-planning, thinking things were settled only to have some new unpleasant wrinkle pop up, dealing with unhappy people and colleagues, guarding my words, shutting my door every time the phone rings …

It’s been, frankly, exhausting and draining, a big reason why posting here (and elseblog) has been so light, and the sole reason why I’ve missed a few days of NaNoWriMo*. It’s also a reason (on top of NaNo) that I haven’t been doing any online gaming.

And, again, yes, I know, cry me a river, and it will be far greater a burden (and one just starting) for the people who’ve been let go. I’m well aware of that, and it doesn’t actually make me feel any better.

(Though, while I had the initial thought of, “How awful for those people to have this happen right before the holidays.” it occurs to me that there are no good times for something like this to happen — and actually having it happen before Thanksgiving means they have a chance to (unfortunately) tighten their belts with the gift-giving, which to my mind is better than running up a big credit card debt for the holidays and then getting your notice on January 1st.)

But things will go on. Work will be more difficult with fewer hands, some things are in the works (the “distraction” I mentioned) that will help in some ways and possibly hinder in others. Eventually business will pick back up (the fundamentals around here being solid), and the demand for new IT staff will come up, and we might just end up with some of those folks back working for us again. I’ve seen stranger things happen.

And, after three weeks, the most wrenching part is over.

Life goes on, with changes, losses, pains, and occasional pleasures. Let’s hope matters are a bit more settled and a bit less crazy in the weeks to come.

Thanks for your patience, folks.

*Though it has let me craft a 1900 word blog entry. Ahem.