Now that Coronavirus stands as an epidemic, some organisations have ordered their employees to work from home.
The recent is the social media network, Twitter.
While this work has taken effect in Non-African countries, it is safe to assume that interruptions can be expected anytime soon in African based companies.
While the majority have sent their employees home for remote working, others may take radical measures towards the effect of the pandemic.
We are talking about the worst nightmare of an employee, layoff!
However, before you consider going that path, you need to ask yourself the following questions:
Do you know your top performers?
With records of your staff having top performance, you could consider a layoff.
Having access to the documents you have the opportunity to make a review and discuss extensively what would help you make an informed decision.
Considering that after an appraisal, two employees executing the same work and one gets a very high rating compared to the other, then you have got no headaches here in making your decision.
Can you grant a leave of absence?
Your layoff action doesn’t have to be necessarily permanent.
You can give a very good excuse of how the pandemic is affecting the economy, but you reassure that they will get recalled to the organisation, once the pandemic situation is over.
Appear genuine and stick to your words.
Who is/are the core of your team?
Have you ever considered restarting your business all over?
If you will, is there a particular person or group of persons that you would want to start with again? When thoughts like this hit your mind.
There is all the possibility that you have a good colleague or team. Don’t let this person go for anything.
What about other solutions?
Rather than sending on the absence of leave or laying off, you could consider some pay cut across all departments.
However, this could perfectly work if only the CEO tags along the pay cut road.
If you decide to cut down the wages of your employees in the lower cadre but keep on dolling out huge bonuses to your top management in times like this, then you are doing yourself no favour.
Can you combine positions?
With cross-training, you can have your employees execute multiple job roles, at least for some time.
Without this, it would be quite difficult to lay off your employees as it may cost you more than you hope to save.
If work must get done at all costs at a minimal rate, you will need people to execute it.
In times like this, laying off people may just be the next thing in the minds of business owners after working remotely, however, it should get done with good sense.
Featured Image: recruiter
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