SURVIVAL
IT may seem that the healthy response to Vodafone’s recent announcement of plans to lay off 400 of its headquarters staff would be to cross yourself and hope that the redundancy fairy never comes visiting you. But sometimes it’s better in these situations to get sacked.
Psychologists say that employees can suffer from “survival syndrome” if they escape large-scale redundancies — they feel less motivated, less loyal and even guilty for hanging on while their friends got the boot. Trying to think of something original to write in all those “Sorry you’re leaving” cards can prove pretty demoralising, too.
But it can also prove far worse than that. Successfully evading mass lay-offs can accelerate your appointment with the Grim Reaper. A seven-year British Medical Journal study of 22,430 staff who managed to keep their jobs after a big round of cutbacks in Finnish councils found that their death rates from heart attacks and strokes doubled in the ensuing four years — the period when people are most likely to die after an event that causes shock or grief.
The study, led by the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, suggests that the higher death rates are because the staff who hung on to their jobs had to work harder to ensure that their organisations provided the same level of service.
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At the same time they were left feeling insecure about their prospects. The remaining workers also felt that they had little control over their careers. If you subject rats in a lab to those types of stresses, they soon keel over.
Cary Lichtman, an industrial psychologist at Wayne State University in Detroit, suggests that if you find yourself in a similar situation, you should forget about guilt and focus on practical matters such as finding out how big your colleagues’ redundancy packages were. Oh, he also recommends that you start looking for another job.