Smith tries to pinpoint the characteristics that would help an employee to be retained, "I believe retention depends a lot on the personality, experience, and leadership abilities of the individual."
But for CEOs, the decision is seldom that simple: in companies where the HR is effective, employees too will have good skill sets and will be committed to the cause. In such situations, there could be many 'excellent' people for the one job and there could be many who snugly fit the culture of the company; so the decision could very well be about a particular mix of 'attitudes', 'thinking' and 'multiple skill-sets', rather than 'loyalty', 'experience' and 'commitment' when deciding on those who are to be let go.
Ahmed Siddiqi, elaborates, "The kind of people the company would want to retain are the ones who can multitask. For example one guy who is good in operations, and can also be used for relationship management would end up being the one that the bank tries to retain."
Smith looks towards the psyche of the decision maker in terms of analysing the potential candidates for being laid-off, "The CEO and the senior management's experiences, in conjunction with their personality, will have a huge impact on how they make business decisions, and who in turn they choose to be let go." Gary explains further, "A risk averse CEO, for instance, might try to survive a difficult situation by relying on the most experienced of his employees rather than a less experienced but more skilful employee."
Most companies look towards contractual employees as the first line of defence in a downsizing situation. These employees are not on the company payroll, and face the earliest possible exist in a situation where costs need to be cut down. Interestingly though, in other situations, companies can potentially also look to have more contractual staff and outsourced resources rather than in house specialist teams capable of performing the same job. For such companies, it is a question of better efficiency and more feasibility of outsourcing or contracting rather than having in-house permanent resources.
Berkson of Art Exchange raises an important point, "When the layoff is a response to a reduction in business, productivity must be taken into account and staff reduction must only be made in areas where the production is measurable and controllable according to actual business demands.
"In areas where production is unpredictable, then step downs and layoffs must be monitored and not so hasty." This would be particularly important for manufacturing companies where the demand for goods can go through seasonal patterns and may be unpredictable. This is something that can occur in evolving markets such as Pakistan. An FMCG company, for instance, would not want itself to be in a situation where it needs to hire more factory workers to meet a sudden hike in demand for a particular product, when they have just let factory workers go based on a decreased average demand for the very same product.
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