Yesterday I got a call from Pelastakaa Lapset ry - Save the Children Finland, they were asking if it's possible for me to increase the donation. It took me a moment to answer, and I explained on the phone, that I was calculating, since I was out of work for a long while and I am technically still recovering (which is true). The guy on the other side was surprised, that I was donating even though I was unemployed.
Now, this is not a financial advise in any way, but I did not stop donating to them or to SOS Children's Villages International (Russian branch) or to Finnish Red Cross - Suomen Punainen Risti while being unemployed for almost a year. I had thoughts of that, but I did not. My logic was simple: there are people that are still way worse off than me, and my small donations, while not affecting my livelihood that much, can still be helping others, which is a worthy cause and reason enough to forgo a takeout a couple of times and eat something cheap and not fancy at home. Like, I can find a way to cut costs by changing my ways just a little bit, so why not do that?
I believe, that when your company is facing financial troubles, you need to treat your employees as I am treating people whom I am helping through donations. You do not know how tough it can be for an employee, that you are laying off, if they lose the job. If you cut them off, you will save money, but you will also lose an important resource, that can give you back. So why not use that resource to find a better way?
I am not saying that layoffs is an instrument you can't use ever. You can, and arguably there may be times, when you should. But only as last resort, when you have exhausted all other possible instruments. When you optimized your processes so much that there is no room for improvement, when there is just no other way you can use available human resource to increase your profits in mid- and long-term. When you say "we are not making profit", ask "why?". In most cases the answer will be unrelated to people, unless you hired people just for the sake of hiring them or you have been systemically hiring wrong people for wrong positions.
This is akin to reinstalling Windows. It is a valid solution to solve a problem, but no person in their right mind would want the hassle of doing that (even when they have backups), if they can run some script that will fix the issue in a couple of minutes. Unless that person is from Microsoft support and suggest fixing an obvious UI bug in Outlook by creating a new profile, despite Outlook profiles having nothing in common with how UI is rendered.
So if you are considering lay-offs as a way to save company's money, think again. Think if you can re-shuffle available resources to improve processes and products you have. In most cases your issues are caused by wrong people in wrong places, and you just being too prideful to admit it and too scared to try to change things and fix your own incompetence.
