Losing your job is never fun.

I’ve been thinking about the economic downturn quite a bit over the past few days — while trying to stay positive, of course — and have been particularly interested in how major companies have been dealing with layoffs.

And I haven’t been impressed.

Don’t get me wrong: I understand that letting go of employees is necessary in times of economic hardship. What sets me off, however, is the way some companies have been choosing to get rid of their workers.

I encourage you all to read a recent blog post by George Oates, who was laid off by Yahoo! a few days ago:

Sent a quick, unsatisfying goodbye to the team. I watched as my access to various parts of the guts of Flickr fell away. I noticed how naturally I searched for any and all bits I could think of, just in the hope that it still existed. But no. I was shut out entirely within about 14 hours of the phone call.

This kind of treatment to anyone would be despicable, but it’s even worse when you remember that George was the key person responsible for the best thing that Flickr has done since its inception, as well as having her hand in designing its award-winning interface.

Losing your job is painful enough. Why do some employers insist on making the transition process as difficult as possible?

Companies and executives that are put in the position where they have to let go of employees need to realize that the best thing they can do for their workers (other than not lay them off, of course) is to make sure they are treated with respect and dignity so that the layoff process isn’t full of anguish, but instead becomes an time for growth and new opportunities. After all, these were the same people that ensure the success of your organization when economic times were good.

To Keep or Not to Keep?

Here’s another question that needs to be asked: are layoffs even necessary? If you look at it from an opportunity cost (and long-term) perspective, layoffs don’t seem to make much sense.

Immense amounts of time and money are spent by organizations each year to find, entice, recruit, hire, train, and retain good employees. Yet, in times of economic slowdown, these same employees — workers that have already cost the organization valuable time and money in the HR process — are let go even though the rehiring the same caliber of employee once the economy rebounds will require another intense investment of resources.

In the long term, does it not make sense to keep the good employees?

In a recent interview, Steve Jobs echoed the same sentiment:

We’ve had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren’t going to lay off people, that we’d taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place — the last thing we were going to do is lay them off. And we were going to keep funding. In fact we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over.

Makes sense to me. But then again, I’m no economist or CEO. If I were and had to conduct layoffs, however, I’d do my best to be nice about them.

In the meantime, to George Oates and all the other people being affected by layoffs and staffing changes, I send you my best wishes to get through this tumultuous period and come out not only unscathed, but stronger.