Sowing the Seeds of Retrenchment | Big Think

Sowing the Seeds of Retrenchment

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Companies need to get better at explaining to employees the intrinsic risks of their jobs, according to forecaster and essayist Paul Saffo.

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Paul Saffo:

Paul Saffo is a forecaster and essayist with over two decades experience exploring long-term technological change and its practical impact on business and society. He teaches at Stanford University and is a Visiting Scholar in the Stanford Media X research network.

He was the founding chairman of the Samsung Science Board and serves on a variety of other boards including the Long Now Foundation, the Singapore National Research Foundation Science Advisory Board, and the Pax Group. He has served as an advisor and Forum Fellow to the World Economic Forum since 1997.

He is a columnist for ABCNews.com, and his essays have appeared in numerous publications including The Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Wired, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, The New York Times, and the Washington Post. He is a Fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, and holds degrees from Harvard College, Cambridge University and Stanford University.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Topic: Advice on Letting Employees Go

Paul Saffo: You know, the best way to let people go is to let them know when they’re hired that it’s an uncertain environment and that their job is always at risk and even if you let them go, it’s not that you don’t love them.

We do this quite well here in Silicon Valley. The economic bargain when you join a startup company is you know it is a risky proposition and the company may not exist and if it doesn’t, there’s no expectation of lifetime employment.

So I think companies over the last 10 years have done a very bad job of explaining to their employees what the intrinsic risks are. All I know is, if you wait until you let the employee go to deal with the issue of how do you communicate to the employee about being let go, it’s too late to do anything.

Question: How do you maintain the morale of the employees that remain?

Paul Saffo: Clarity in this period of uncertainty is absolutely essential to employee morale and the clarity goes not just to how long their jobs would last, but to the nature of the job. Look at the deep transformation in what a job is, and how it’s changed over the last couple of decades.