Holding the CIO helm steady post lay offs

Currently, the CIO, in many organizations, is under pressure. For those who have already embarked upon the Digital Transformation journey, even more. They are expected to keep the DX journey going, more often than not, with equal gusto as before even though there are budgetary constraints. It isn’t managing with less, but doing more with less. Not just less budget for investments, but also less people, in some cases, the same keeping the lights on effort and additional DX.

What perhaps hits the hardest is the result of layoffs. Not just in terms of distribution of work, but potential drops in morale and resulting drops in productivity. This year saw some initial layoffs in April, and then there have been trickles in many organizations which are expected to continue for a while.

If not carefully planned for, the aftermath, often, has a telling effect. There definitely is an emotional toll on the employees, but the expectation is that the employees will accept and understand the situation and move on; on their own. That doesn’t happen and quickly leads to drop in productivity and even retention. Attrition comes back to bite when the market demand becomes somewhat better.

Headcount decisions, however, become unavoidable in some situations. Our experience suggests the following two pronged approach to overcome the possible negative impact.

Maintaining the trust level

Trust is what takes the first hit, and rebuilding it is of prime importance; perhaps even more than creating a plan. It is important to initiate dialogue with the immediate team members and encourage them to do the same for their second line. Engaging with people at different levels, necessarily through line managers, does the job. The lines of communication must be crisp, and the frequency of communication high. Involving HR to facilitate helps, but delegating the conversation to them takes away from credibility and is poor form.

For a situation like this, especially in these pandemic times, one must expectsome resistance. To counter, there must be mechanisms, through influencers, for feedback to float up and for action to be taken immediately. These influencers might be the same identified stakeholders from your Digital Transformation effort who help with managing change. As a CIO, you need to have kept some money aside for these actions that need to be taken. Town-hall sessions, Ask Me Anything sessions, meeting and interacting with small and heterogeneous groups are helpful not just to gauge the mood and vibe but also to pass messages directly .

A large part of building trust is being able to foster realism, and being transparent. You, as the CIO, must support the corporate position regardless of your personal stand. This will keep your emotions from clouding your business judgement. These are hard facts, and you will need to create an implementation plan parts of which will need to be transparent.

Prioritize and Plan

After the execution of the layoffs, it will be important to revisit the routine task list, and the DX projects. It is likely that there will be some work re-organization required involving re-identifying and focusing on some quick wins; perhaps areas of higher visibility, and business relevance but of relatively lower implementation complexity. This will demonstrate a sense of direction, and provide the right signals to the enterprise leadership and also to the employees.

Our experiential sense is that many of these crises can be overcome by focusing on the people, empowering them and being able to react quickly. In fact,This is the time that a CIO’s nimbleness, and proactivity will get tested regularly. If carefully thought through, your organization will come out of the crisis safe, robust and more close knit than ever.

Has your CIO organization recently undergone a spate of layoffs or budget cuts? We can help you bring your organization back on track in an accelerated fashion; Talk to us.