Must read books about Layoffs and Downsizing:
If you are in the insurance industry and seeing consolidation or outside of the industry & experiencing your own threats of layoffs, it is important to gain knowledge about what to expect, how to make the most of the situation, bounce back, etc. Also, if you are in HR and your firm is considering layoffs it is important to understand how your employees are feeling or may view the situation. These are the must read books about layoffs and downsizing.
The insurance industry is increasing an increasing rate of Mergers and Acquisitions, and as a result “Synergies” which means Layoffs and Downsizing. See our article about Mergers and Acquisitions in (Re)Insurance.
It’s important to be prepared, educate, stay positive and bounce back.
For Employees:
THE BOUNCE BACK: Personal Stories of Bouncing Back Faster and Higher from a Layoff, Re-org or Career Setback
“The Bounce Back” reveals how leading Career Coach Sherri Thomas and 13 other professionals and executives successfully navigated through career threatening challenges including being laid off, demoted, struggled with a bad manager or bounced from low-paying unsatisfying jobs.
Although the book reveals the dark side of what millions of Americans are facing today which is being either unemployed, laid off or undervalued in the job market, the overall message is clearly uplifting which is, “Yes, there is life after a layoff!” and gives readers the roadmap and insider secrets to get re-hired, promoted and rebound into a more gratifying and higher paying career.
Each chapter is filled with smart, powerful strategies from the Bounce Back achievers on how they rebounded from a variety of challenges including how they told their “career story” to hiring managers, how they made gut-wrenching decisions to leave their safe but unfulfilling jobs, how they contacted their network to get job leads, referrals and recommendations, how they customized their resume, and the courageous steps they took to land in a more meaningful, purposeful and even higher-salaried career. This is a must-read for any professional or executive who experienced a setback and wants a more meaningful and fulfilling career.
Sherri Thomas is a Career Strategist, award-winning author and international speaker. She is also the Founder/President of Career Coaching 360 which helps professionals and executives reinvent themselves into a more meaningful and enriching career.
Buy Here: THE BOUNCE BACK: Personal Stories of Bouncing Back Faster and Higher from a Layoff, Re-org or Career Setback
The Job Search Navigator: An Expert’s Guide to Getting Hired, Surviving Layoffs, and Building Your Career
The Job Search Navigator is a comprehensive guide to finding a new job in today’s evolving career marketplace. Author Matt Durfee writes from the perspective of someone who has both recruited for some of America’s biggest companies and navigated his way through nine of his own job losses.
The book combines practical real-world perspectives with the technical knowledge job seekers need in order to excel at every aspect of their searches. Drawing on the knowledge Durfee accumulated through his own experiences, searches, and big-brand corporate hiring responsibilities, The Job Search Navigator abandons the “clinical approach” of many other career-advice books. Instead, Durfee gives easy-to-follow strategies and, perhaps more importantly, recounts in illuminating detail the kinds of mistakes that led him to develop these strategies.
Despite recent reports of soaring corporate profits and gross domestic product growth, the effects of the Great Recession are still very real to the nearly 20 million Americans who are either jobless or underemployed. In these uncertain times, The Job Search Navigator is a reliable guide to every step of the 21st-century job hunt, whether readers are laid off, wanting to change careers after surviving cutbacks, or seeking a better full-time gig in a stagnant marketplace.
Buy Here: The Job Search Navigator: An Expert’s Guide to Getting Hired, Surviving Layoffs, and Building Your Career
Getting Back to Work: Everything You Need to Bounce Back and Get a Job After a Layoff
You can’t always control losing your job, but you can control your reaction and the decisions you make afterward
In Getting Back to Work, Linda Rolie, an expert in strategic career development with a background as a psychiatric therapist, gives you time-tested tools for finding a new job in today’s tough economy, while also working through the psychological challenges you might face after being laid off.
In Getting Back to Work, you’ll find:
- Guidance managing emotions and stress while searching for a new job
- Exercises to identify transferable skills, knowledge, abilities, and qualifications
- Templates for writing impressive resumes, cover letters, and thank-you notes,
- Tips on networking, resume building, interviewing, and how to answer the “why did you get laid off?” and “aren’t you overqualified?” questions
- Research methods for finding a job, helpful Internet sites and other resources
Buy Here: Getting Back to Work: Everything You Need to Bounce Back and Get a Job After a Layoff
The Layoff Survival Guide: How You Can Negotiate Your Severance Agreement and Get the Added Benefits You Need to Bridge the Gap to Your Next Job
Laid off, let go, downsized, dismissed…its all means the same… No job in the morning. It can happen to you.
You show up to work on time, rested, looking your best and ready to go. In a few hours you find your self no longer a member of the team…unemployed. Don’t get caught without knowing how to negotiate for a better severance package on your way out. Inside you will learn:
- How to Effectively Negotiate Your Severance Package
- How Negotiating your Severance Agreement Can Make a Huge Difference
- The Important Questions to Ask Before Departing
Buy Here: The Layoff Survival Guide: How You Can Negotiate Your Severance Agreement and Get the Added Benefits You Need to Bridge the Gap to Your Next Job
Watch: How to Deal with Being Laid Off
For Employers:
Responsible Restructuring: Creative and Profitable Alternatives to Layoffs
Firms that restructure through downsizing are not more profitable than those that don’t, and often end up hurting themselves in the long run. Responsible Restructuring draws on the results of an eighteen-year study of S&P 500 firms to prove that it makes good business sense to restructure responsibly-to avoid downsizing and instead regard employees as assets to be developed rather than costs to be cut.
Wayne Cascio explodes thirteen common myths about downsizing, detailing its negative impact on profitability, productivity, quality, and on the morale, commitment, and even health of survivors. He uses real-life examples to illustrate successful approaches to responsible restructuring used by companies such as Charles Schwab, Compaq, Cisco, Motorola, Reflexite, and Southwest Airlines. And he offers specific, step-by-step advice on what to do-and what not to do-when developing and implementing a restructuring strategy that, unlike layoffs, leaves the organization stronger and better able to face the challenges ahead.
Buy Here: Responsible Restructuring: Creative and Profitable Alternatives to Layoffs
Leading After a Layoff: Reignite Your Team’s Productivity…Quickly
Help your team survive the damaging effects of a layoff
Learn how to keep the company running and profitable–and your team motivated and happy
Being laid off from a job can be devastating. The experience can be just as brutal for the manager of a surviving team. You need to lead your team to higher productivity just as low morale, survivor guilt, and confusion are at their peak.
You need a twelve-week program that brings your team back to life and makes them less vulnerable to layoffs!
With Ray Salemi’s twelve-week recovery plan, you’ll learn the secrets of bringing employees back from the organizational-and emotional-turmoil of downsizing.
- Rebuild Trust: Create a bond of loyalty with your team members that can’t be affected by layoffs.
- Survey the Damage: Assess the needs of the department and company.
- Lead So Others Will Follow: Help your team take ownership of its recovery and place in the organization.
- Foster Emotional Recovery: Help your team members heal themselves with simple techniques.
Let Salemi mentor and guide you through the step-by-step development plan that takes groups in complete disarray and rebuilds them into highly functioning teams.
Buy Here: Leading After a Layoff: Reignite Your Team’s Productivity…Quickly
Healing the Wounds: Overcoming the Trauma of Layoffs and Revitalizing Downsized Organizations
From the founder of “layoff survivor sickness” an updated edition of a book for today’s downsized workforce
Thoroughly revised and updated, David Noer’s classic book about downsized organizations has never been more relevant. Reports of the most recent layoffs are making the front pages of our newspapers with frightening regularity. And massive downsizing continues to reshape the face of American business. But what about those who remain behind? Healing the Wounds provides an antidote to the widespread malaise on the American business scene left in the wake of workforce reductions. Drawing on case studies and original research, David M. Noer-an expert frequently quoted in major media such as The Wall Street Journal and Fortune on the topic of layoffs and layoff survivor sickness–provides executives, human resource professionals,managers, and consultants with an original model and clear guidelines for revitalizing downsized organizations and the employees left behind.
- Offers thoroughly revised edition of a book about layoffs and those who are left behind
- Filled with relevant case studies and recent research
- Written by David Noer an acclaimed expert on the topic
- Gives employers much-needed guidance for revitalizing downsized companies
Buy Here: Healing the Wounds: Overcoming the Trauma of Layoffs and Revitalizing Downsized Organizations
The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences
The Disposable American is an eye-opening account of layoffs in America—their questionable necessity, their overuse, and their devastating impact on individuals at all income levels. Yet despite all this, they are accelerating.
The award-winning New York Times economics writer Louis Uchitelle explains how, in the mid-1970s, the first major layoffs, initiated as a limited response to the inroads of foreign competition, spread and multiplied, in time destroying the notion of job security and the dignity of work. We see how the barriers to layoffs tumbled, and how by the late 1990s the acquiescence was all but complete.
In a compelling narrative, the author traces the rise of job security in the United States to its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, and then the panicky U-turn. He describes the unraveling through the experiences of both executives and workers: three CEOs who ran the Stanley Works, the tool manufacturer, from 1968 through 2003, who gradually became more willing to engage in layoffs; highly skilled aircraft mechanics in Indianapolis discarded as United Airlines shut down a state-of-the-art maintenance facility, damaging the city as well as the workers; a human resources director at Citigroup, declared nonessential despite excellent performance; a banker in Connecticut lucky to find a lower-paying job in a state tourist office.
Uchitelle makes clear the ways in which layoffs are counterproductive, rarely promoting efficiency or profitability in the long term. He explains how our acquiescence encourages wasteful mergers, outsourcing, the shifting of production abroad, the loss of union protection, and wage stagnation. He argues against our ongoing public policy—inaugurated by Ronald Reagan and embraced by every president since—of subsidizing retraining for jobs that, in fact, do not exist. He breaks new ground in documenting the failure of these policies and in describing the significant psychological damage that the trauma of a layoff invariably inflicts, even on those soon reemployed. It is damage that, multiplied over millions of layoffs, is silently undermining the nation’s mental health.
While recognizing that in today’s global economy some layoffs must occur, the author passionately argues that government must step in with policies that encourage companies to restrict layoffs and must generate jobs to supplement the present shortfall.There are specific recommendations for achieving these goals and persuasive arguments that workers, business, and the nation will benefit as a result.
An urgent, essential book that tells for the first time the story of our long and gradual surrender to layoffs—from a writer who has covered the unwinding for nearly twenty years and who now bears witness.
