Right Sizing

In LIU, learned the right-sizing strategy, never thought I'd be in that situation.

At the end of January, the site manager announced the company needed to lay off some employees. Our site is small but there's no exception. Two of my colleagues were selected and it was so sudden. I understand the need but the way he did was so unacceptable.

After calling each one of the two personally to break out the bad news, he insisted that they left the office immediately. Both were girls. One of them took it in a hard way, she couldn't stop crying and still couldn't understand why it had to be her. Everybody else had gone for lunch. I just happened to skip lunch that day so I had witnessed everything.

The girl was still in shock and tried to collect her belongings into her bag. I was with her to help and tried to console her. I felt really bad and could help end up crying with her. The site manager came to us and made us leave the office before everybody else came back from lunch. He did that repeatedly till we left the office. He told her to come back tomorrow for her stuff. I think that was cruel. He just took a job from her and now he's chasing her away just because he didn't want to see a scene in his office!!

I walked her out of the office and then the other victim came back from lunch. She was alone with the site manager while everybody else was still at lunch break and, worse, she was my teammate. I came back after spending times with the first girl who's my close colleague, just to find out my teammate was laid off too. And I didn't even have time to be with her when she left the office.

The internal meeting was held immediately after everybody was back from the break. It was a big shock for everyone and we couldn't concentrate on our work that whole afternoon. We are such a small site and we think the money the company spend on us was so less that they wouldn't take us into account. We have always been the forgetten site but now our site is one of the target of getting rid off.

Well, business is business. I hate when they say these things happen. I just can't accept that we, the operation level employees, are always the victim of the failure of their management.