When I read the letter from The CEO of AirBNB to the staff, a few parts stood out;
The first was on clarity of business mission, he wrote, ‘as I have learned these past eight weeks, a crisis brings you clarity about what is truly important. Though we have been through a whirlwind, some things are more clear to me than ever before.’
He went on to explain how the fundamental changes will be around ‘a more focussed business strategy.’
If your business comes out of this with greater clarity, brings you back to your central focus, your purpose, you have indeed been granted a huge opportunity to reset and reinvent your business to be better than it ever was.
The second part that stood out for me was on the process it took to decide which staff will be laid off. He wrote, ‘we then did a comprehensive review of every team member and made decisions based on critical skills, and how well those skills matched our future business needs.
Priority will always be given to skills sets when it comes to lay off decisions.
Whether the skills are people skills or technical skills, staff that show misalignment to what the business needs to succeed will be let go. Staff that exhibit the wrong attitude to work; showing little or no concern, disengagement, disloyalty, will be impacted even more than staff that lack the technical skills required to forge ahead.
As sad as layoffs may seem, for a lot of organisations it is an opportunity to clean up the house, another chance to get the hiring of your team right.
These are difficult times and decisions to make but just like all challenges, the opportunities to start afresh abound. Reset, Refocus and Reposition.
The future is bright.
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