The True Cost of Layoffs

Bloomberg News Senior Management and Workplace Reporter Matt Boyle breaks down the reporting from his latest Businessweek piece.
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[Skilliard]

Smart companies rely on attrition and hiring freezes to downsize. Avoids severance charges, has far less impact on morale/productivity.

[tobym]

The worst part is that the layoff is likely happening because of the ineffective senior managers in the C-suite who mismanaged the companies strategy and growth and likely misread the market adjustment that caused them to need to layoff employees in the first place. Those same managers (if they stick around) end up getting rewarded with stock and stock options that are worth more when they eventually restructure and improve the bottom line.

[EthelbertCoyote]

Layoffs have so many hidden costs for companies. What is the value of the brain drain to a company. What is the value of retraining your remaining workforce to cover functions not considered? What is the cost of spinning up new ways of doing things to maximize a companies new size, and come up with testing to make sure your new normal is normal?

[frali]

I worked at an OEM van manufacturer in the UK (household name outside of the usa) and we had dozens of people in van sales. During covid we cut the number of people in sales to 4. We sell a fraction of the number of vans we used to where each person in sales that was fired brought in hunders of thousands to millions of £££. Really stupid and everyone except our MD (british verson of a CEO) thinks it was stupid af

[TheSnerggly]

Companies don't care about employees moral when they are trying to show stock holders that the layoffs helped the stock prices.

[UncleDavesKitchen]

I'm an RN, we get called off rather than laid off. Working three 12 hour shifts a week they can call us off (short staffing) 2 days a week so we only get 12 hours of pay a week. This encourages us to look elsewhere for employment. Then when the hospital gets busy we are worked with patient assignments that are not manageable and told we can't perform our job requirements and they fire good nurses, over worked.

[chenghonggoh]

The true cost of a layoffs lie in the families affected. Too high to put a number on it.

[tiufamily]

The solution I see happening a lot with coorprate America is to let go of expensive American workers and send work to staff in lower cost countries.

[justB-yw]

I’ve been layed off have never seen a severance pay…

[Jonnyrockin]

It's a very good point to step back and look at the bigger impact on costs, and as well the costs to families, the businesses impacted by those families. This is not a lefty socialist idea, its really looking deeper at a long tail of the impact and brining those impact costs as part of the equation.

[FranciszekPawal]

With 22% of Americans lacking retirement savings, I'm seeking advice on growing my depleted $120k.

[tomb]

How about laying off the HR department so that they don't feel they have to keep hiring to make themselves seem important.

And if you do have to lay off and then lose more people than you thought you were going to, how about going back to those you let go and see if the ones you need might want to come back?

[UpTheHillBackwards]

Insightful analysis backed up with data.

[jackdXB]

Very interesting, i wonder though if the cost of Austerity measures by laid off staff whom now need keep an eye on their spending is taken into account on product purchases, effecting sales across the board!?

[paganlark]

Also those people will talk shit on the company that lays them off for literally the rest of their lives. There has to be some brand equity impact from that.

[Phlegethon]

$65, 000 haha in San Francisco their average salary is $150, 000

[lance]

Buy American that’s how you fix the country 🇺🇸

[bluesteel]

When are we going to start holding execs responsible for bad bussiness decisions ?

[internetpointsbank]

Trimming the fat leads to a healthy life.

[gnuemacs]

No cost to replace an American with an imported worker, the cost is the American