I’ve been in a situation where we had to reduce the workforce by a significant number of people (20% of workforce). The management team decided to rank employees in relation to several areas we felt were critical if we were going to be able to continue to perform and care for our customers. We looked at things like flexibility, willingness to take on additional tasks, cooperation with others and things of this nature, as well as overall job performance. There were several people on the potential layoff list who were over 40. We wound up laying off 3 individuals who were in that age group and they joined together and filed suit alleging age discrimination. In truth, one of the employees was uncooperative, combative, refused to help anyone with anything that wasn’t part of her job and thought most things were beneath her. Another was dictating, inflexible, rude, arrogant and refused to cooperate with others. Performance issues should have been handled prior to the layoff, but their managers sugar-coated these issues in their reviews and did everything they could to avoid conflict, thus creating a nightmare for those of us who came after and had to deal with the problem. The 3rd person was a pretty good employee, but she didn’t have the depth of experience or knowledge that her co-workers had. She also had a very negative attitude. But in all 3 cases, the people who were retained were all also over 40…some were older than the people who were laid off…with the exception of one individual who was in her mid-30′s. So it should have been obvious that age was not a factor in the layoff.

The lesson to me was simply this: deal with performance issues immediately. Don’t wait until you have to make a choice between retaining or laying off one employee over another. I think this is what happens a lot of the time during a reduction and it comes back to bite you. That would be my advice…and hopefully that will help someone else down the road.