Looking Back on a Reorganisation

It’s been about 5 months since I was initially told that my role was disestablished and a new organisation structure would be in place in a few months in our department. It’s been about 3 months since I knew for sure I would be leaving the company. And it’s been 2 days since I handed in my laptop, work phone and work badge.

I’ve learned a lot, both from my lived experience but also from how I see others faring in this reorganisation. Or to call a spade a spade - these rounds of layoffs.

In writing this blog post, I hope to help at least one person learn something valuable regarding economics, job safety, and job-hunting in a tough market.

Alrighty, let’s get into this!

1. Let’s Talk Economics and Business

In a LinkedIn post, I mentioned 2 of the lessons I learned at my previous workplace:

“1. Be mindful of where you are in the business and ultimately what problem you are there to solve. Are you helping bringing in money or helping save money? Then have a think about how what you do in the day to day, week to week etc. is contributing to solving that problem.

2. Have an awareness of how the company is doing as a business. How much awareness you need depends on your role. Your ability to do this may also be affected by how transparent the company is around statistics like sales, etc.”

Here are some questions that could be good for you to get the answers to, at your company (or ask yourself if it’s not really a company question)

• Am I in a Cost Centre or a Profit Centre? (i.e. Am I helping the company save money or make money?) I highly recommend you read this issue of the Pragmatic Engineer which goes into Cost Centre or a Profit Centre in more detail.

• What does the labour market look like for people in your industry? Are there lots of people with your skillset? Are there lots of people with your level of experience? Realistic Assumption: Your competition for roles are people who live in your area. But, technically people can still move. Economics models assume there is free movement of labour. (i.e. people can easily move house) Here you can read more details on the economics of the labour market (and what you can expect would happen to wages/salary as supply of labour increases and decreases).

Also note, this can be majorly impacted by other reorganisations in your area.

Here is how it may look:

1. You start your role in a good job market for candidates. i.e. employers are in dire need of good people and there is a shortage of people with your skillset. At this point, there is a low amount of labour in the labour market, thus wages/salaries are high.
2. As a result, you are able to negotiate a good salary.
3. Multiple companies start to do reorganisations. This increases the amount of labour in the labour market - thus lowering wages/salaries.
4. You are then impacted by a reorganisation. Even further increasing the amount of labour in the labour market.

• Where does your company (and/or your department) lie on the curve of the Law of Diminishing Returns?

According to Wikipedia:

“The law of diminishing returns (also known as the law of diminishing marginal productivity) states that in a productive process, if a factor of production continues to increase, while holding all other production factors constant, at some point a further incremental unit of input will return a lower amount of output. The law of diminishing returns does not imply a decrease in overall production capabilities; rather, it defines a point on a production curve at which producing an additional unit of output will result in a lower profit.”

To answer this question, you can look at sales data, number of employees, and other growth statistics to see how the relationship has changed between input and output.

It won’t be easy.

But if you find that your company is on the upwards trends (are increasing returns), then in my opinion, the company is doing very well and is unlikely to do a reorganisation.

2. Job Safety

This is heavily impacted by how well your company is doing as a business, and depending on your role, you may be able to do very little to move the needle at your company.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• How does your manager perceive the value you bring to the company? How do the people around you perceive your value-add? I’m intentionally talking about perception here and not what you actually do because, (and I learned this lesson) this really matters. It really really matters. There will be conversations behind closed doors, that you don’t know about, and your manager would campaign on your behalf during these reorganisations. If you’re doing a fantastic job, but you are being modest and not wanting to bother them with things, then think about what may happen as a result.

• Does LIFO (Last In First Out) apply to where you are? In Sweden we have a law called LAS, maybe you have something similar where you are. There can also be exceptions to this, but this can impact job safety.

• Is what you are working on in one of the highest-prioritised areas of the business? While the work your team does may be valuable, it might not be one of the most important problems that needs to be solved. Take note on which achievements/key results are getting more attention at a higher level (if you can) or promoted at a wider level to other parts of the company. Also, take note of where the higher ups say more investment is needed. (And ask yourself: Are I working in that area?)

• Some people have more influence than others. They’ll be better able to protect their areas of the organisation (or at least minimise the amount of headcount reduction in their area in the round(s) of layoffs. These people may have very heavy amounts of political capital to spend in such times.

Note: Everything I write here is fairly subjective. So having any certainty around whether or not your job is safe or not is hard to know for sure. But, it can be valuable to gather this information anyway to determine the different possibilities of what may lay ahead for you.

3. Job-Hunting in a Tough Market

When I started to sense a reorganisation was coming and I took a step back to see all the different scenarios that could arise, I realised there was a very real possibility I would not “survive” the reorganisation/round of layoffs that were coming our way.

I reached out to some people in my network who were looking for a role as I had seen heaps of #OpenToWork posts on LinkedIn. They told me “good luck out there”, it’s really hard right now.

I started to freak out a wee bit.

There were a lot of people looking for a role who are fantastic, but the competition out there was (and is) tough.

Here is what I learned (based on my and others’ experiences):

• You may be the perfect fit for a role, and you might not even get an interview
• You may be the perfect fit for a role, get a referral and still not hear back from the company
• You may have had a professional (or hiring managers or recruiters) review your CV, and you still won’t hear anything
• There are roles that are advertised that you have no chance at getting because there is an internal candidate that they already have in mind, but they have to follow the process
• Your network matters a lot here. The only interviews I got was through the connections I had.

Long story short, you can “do everything right” and still not succeed, and it sucks. You’ll have people offer well-meaning (or plain ignorant) advice but in a market this tough, the advice just doesn’t apply here.