Losing your job during a pandemic

I feel a great deal of sympathy and empathy towards those losing their jobs/occupation/profession and career during the current 2020 pandemic. Who’d seen the impact that such event would have happened in our times. We were side-swiped and oblivious, and ill-prepared, and as time has shown none of us are immune to the knock-on effects of the virus and change. During this past week I have seen increasingly that a number of my past acquaintances, or those in my related industries, start to lose their jobs – this is the power of social media and platforms like LinkedIn, making news immediate and personal. If anything the majority of these colleagues have been positive about their outcomes, I am sure in the hope that things will change and a recruitment drive will recover. That said, some companies seem to have been more reactive to their immediate Covid-19 downsizing, focusing clearly on the immediate salary bill, shareholders and payouts, and potentially renegading on agreed hard fought settlements, rather objectively using this process to positively restructure the core business and set new priorities. Indeed, I am sure some businesses have used the pandemic as a tool/mechanism to restructure with a previously hidden agenda that was unpalatable to be originally implemented. That said, for example, stopping all ab-initio training can be shortsighted and in-build a business age imbalance overtime, and terminating the contracts of recent newcomers (just because) and the bottom starters seems at times unfair, and does not actively remove the layers of business maturity/expertise equitably. Of course no system is perfect, or will it be fair, but equally more thought should be given to those actions and responses taken. We all understand that steps need to be taken. Why me? But in the long term the integrity of a business will still need to be maintained. Adopting a fire, rehire, fire culture/strategy is not a good way to operate. Also at the early stages, contractors (often those specialist self-employed staff) are easy targets to be amongst the first to be let go. However, companies/organisations should think why they hired these people, what programmes still need to maintained and developed before reacting. But businesses tend to react, soon forgetting that actually their expertise in certain areas is watered down, at times these actions can leave key functions exposed. Fundamentally it more expensive to get rid of long-term staff, so immediate budgets and cash-flows are protected. So, all I would ask is for those in power to think first because downstream there could be consequences to any rash decision-making. At these pandemic times, unless I am mistaken, or not reported, there does not seem to be openly many Directors/Heads of Departments, falling on their swords again impacting on the shape of the business and making it perhaps unwieldy and top heavy in the short term – yes a business has to function foremost, but key skill sets can be lost forever, along with youth and a business manpower imbalance arising if not managed appropriately, your people matter.