As a senior manager in an era of massive layoffs, it's your job to stave off survivor guilt before it lowers the morale and productivity of remaining employees
The subject of survivor guilt—the despair employees feel when co-workers fall victim todownsizing— comes up during every recession, but 2009 promises a uniquely virulent strain of the affliction. "The layoffs are just starting," says Shafiq Lokhandwala, chief executive officer of NuView Systems, a maker of human resources software. "I think we have only seen about 25% of what's coming." According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in December alone the U.S. lost 524,000 jobs, for a total of 11.1 million unemployed Americans. With the exceptions of health care and education, the recession has hurt every type of industry. In addition to the impact of their sheer volume, the current layoffs present less hope and more complications for folks cut loose by their employers. "In the past layoffs, there was the feeling laid-off people would get similar jobs to the ones they lost," says Sheryl Spanier, a Manhattan career coach. "Today whole types of jobs are going to be eliminated." So if you lived through the 1987 stock market disaster and 2001 dot-com bust, that was just a warm-up exercise in the survivor guilt arena.
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