A study of 4,000 employees who survived layoffs found the opposite of what companies expect: 74% saw their productivity drop, 81% noticed worse customer service, and 77% made more mistakes. Grief over lost colleagues, uncertainty, and extra work left them distracted, not motivated.
The employees who survive your layoff aren't going to work harder. They're actually going to work worse. After one company's layoff, their very famous CEO emailed all of the remaining employees and said that the company would need to be extremely hardcore with long hours at high intensity. Translation: whoever's left had better step it up. We studied more than 4,000 layoff survivors, and that's not what happens. 74% of those folks said their productivity declined since the layoff. 81% said customer service got worse. 77% saw more More errors and mistakes. That's not laziness. Try concentrating while you're wondering if you're in the next round of layoffs, saying goodbye to friends, picking up their unfinished work, and polishing your resume. And 61% of those layoff survivors believed the company's future prospects got worse, no matter what the CEO said about being better positioned for the future. Layoffs are sometimes necessary, but if you're counting on fear to raise performance, the data says you will get the opposite.
