Can anyone that has recently been displaced share if in hindsight, there were any tell tale signs your group was going to be affected in the coming days/weeks?
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There are signs that one is to be fired. Those signs do not necessarily remain in line with the signs of one to be laid off. The reason might be that the one doing the layoff, the manager, often does not know until hours before the layoff. If am manager is to fire an employee, that manager would usually know that weeks ahead of time. In light of that, the manager can avoid asking the employee to join meetings or important projects. Both typical signs of one about to be let go.
Sign 1: a reorg has been talked about by leadership
Sign 2: “leaders” start to leave or are “pursuing other opportunities”.
Sign 3: work has become meaningless or without a future direction.
Sign 4: new “leaders” come in with duplicative roles as other folks.
There are usually signs. I had biweekly 1:1s with manager. Week before layoff, the 1:1 was cancelled.
Here were my signs: Could have been a coincidence, but a few weeks before layoff was changed from salary to hourly (same pay). Definitely not coincidence, a couple of workers from India were hired even though there was not enough work for the current employees in department. Manager went out of way to try to find anything to justify low ranking in performance reviews to guide who they would like gone when layoff time came. When got a meeting invite to meet with manager shortly after that invite (most meeting planned well in advance not short notice) had a good idea was going to be axed so wasn't blindsided when was told.
A group I work with had to train India resources to peform their roles before they got notice. That one should honestly be a pretty obvious clue that it’s coming.
We had zero awareness. It was kept so secret our direct manager didn’t even know until we were let go by our 2 up manager. And 20 of 26 were let go
Zero signs in our department, other than the general firm-wide announcements, The employees who were let go in our area were those who were obviously the managers’ least favorites.
Sign 1: You don’t work in the front office
Keywords to look out for from your management: spans and layers, location strategy, standardization, centralization, efficiency.