It’s not always your fault: Dealing with stigma attached to job loss in India | Calibr

Job termination can be a rough event in one’s life. The causes for job loss can be plenty ranging from downsizing, cost-cutting, redundancy of job roles, company mergers, takeover etc… Regardless of the reasons, the stakes involved for an outgoing employee are always high.

At a time period when the unemployment rate in India is at an unprecedented high (6.6%), losing one’s job can be quite traumatic. And the stereotypes associated with job loss can make it harder. More so in India, where holding a stable and secure job is preferred over risky ventures.

Here are some of the most common grounds which cause job loss and how employees are expected to deal with it.

Layoffs and downsizing

Layoffs involve reducing the number of employees from a company’s operating payroll. This can be part of a company’s downsizing efforts owing to budgetary restraints and the shortage of work. It may not be due to low performance or misconduct of employees.

According to data released by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), over 90 lakh jobs were lost in India between October 2016 to October 2017.

Rajesh Singh, 42, currently heads the HR department at KPIT Technologies and speaks from his 19 years HR experience. He explains, ” There can be different reasons/circumstances that lead to the termination of employees in contemporary workspaces. It can vary from low performance, downsizing, structural changes within the industry (technological advancements) and cyclical, sporadic economic phenomena like the recession.”

“Layoffs are still a minor problem compared to the sweeping macro-level changes that technology and innovation have brought in,” adds Rajesh.

Citing the example of the smartphone revolution, when companies like Nokia and Motorola were forced to fold up and reinvent, Rajesh says, “In this era when big companies are struggling to remain relevant themselves, layoffs resulting from mergers, acquisitions and shutting down of companies altogether should not be surprising,” he adds.

A 26-year-old female employee (who wishes to remain unidentified) shares her thoughts on being laid off from a leading IT firm recently.

“I felt regret and instantly felt like it was my fault. I also thought it was unfair and that they were punishing me for doing something. In such a situations, anxiety always hit you the hardest.” she said.

Cost-cutting

Among the leading companies that announced job cuts in 2018 are retail and technology giants like Jabong, Amazon, Uber, Cognizant, Siemens, and Tesla.

Rajesh Singh tries to explain the scale of the challenge that even the best companies in the world are facing. He points how MNC’s like Alibaba, Amazon, Facebook have all gained global relevance in the past one decade.

“Trends show that around 70% of the top 500 companies in the world may not survive the coming decade. Therefore, this leads to a situation where the management tries to utilize their resources in the most optimal way,” he says. However, in ensuring the same during an organizational turmoil, “employers need to maintain distributional justice,” he further opines.

35-year-old Radha Shree Mitra has more than eight years of experience in the field of HR. According to her, “arriving at a strategic decision that retains the company’s best employees is the most difficult task”.

Often such downsizing and cost-cutting assessments are evaluated on the basis of performance of an employee. It also depends on the team size, scope of vertical restructuring and outplacements that can be offered.

However, is it common for companies to target a particular set of employees for layoffs and cost-cutting measures?

“I think it’s always the freshers/probation employees who are targeted for such personal benefits that the company makes. Especially in a corporate setup,” says the 26-year employee from her individual experience.

Automation and redundancy of job roles

India’s renowned employment generation sector, IT is also among industries that are most prone to suffer from automation. Echoing findings from the World Bank, leading tech analysts have also predicted how automation may render nearly 70 percent of the Indian workforce irrelevant in the coming years.

In the IT industry, automation driven technology is already be making inroads into testing. “Though it is fast catching up, it will take considerable time before automation can replace tasks that require complex cognitive skills to be handled,” shares Rajesh Singh.

Certain job roles have also been retrenched due to operational changes within a company. For example, it is not uncommon in sectors like IT to hear the closure of certain departments (owing to changing customer/client preferences).

Radha feels such sudden closures tend to have repercussions across all job verticals. In these cases, “We first try to place employees internally in another department. Then we also consider a location/center wise shift. Monetary compensation is also offered in some cases before employment termination,” she says explaining from the employer perspective.

“Longer notice periods and social security benefits can also provide the much-needed cushion for outgoing employees”, adds Rajesh. However, he also hints that is important for employees to remain relevant in today’s volatile employment scenario.

“The key to continuing being employable is learnability. Since private sector jobs are no longer fool-proof, employees need to continuously update their skill sets,” he advices.

Radha also concurs with him and adds, “It is on the employees to pick up from performance appraisal lessons and train/upgrade regularly”.

Coping with the stigma

However, this is easier said than practiced for the 26-year-old whose employment was terminated before any bad reviews were given.

“This came as a shock to me. And to hear that several other friends had lost their job in the same way. I understood that it is not always the employee’s fault,” she recounts.

“People should stop thinking that it’s always on the employee than the employer. Sometimes, it works both ways,” she adds.

From Rajesh’s point of view, India still lacks a robust entrepreneurial set-up similar to those in evolved western economies like America.

“As a society, we are yet to embrace the risk taking capability of an individual. We need to be able to fail, learn and move on. More so when there are no safe paths to take, be it government or private sectors,” he says.

Radha empathizes with employees who have to explain their termination (resulting from unfortunate reasons like layoff, cost-cutting measures etc…) to future employers. She believes that even companies should change their mindset in prioritizing skills and performance over the cause of job loss while hiring candidates.

“It is relatively more difficult to describe the grounds of your termination from a smaller company than an MNC. In any case, there is reasonably stereotyping to losing one’s job, considering the rigidity of our job market. But, I hope this will change for the better in the days to come,” she concludes.

Originally published at Calibr