Pink slips a comin' at CitiGroup

God knows I've never worked anyplace with 375,000 employees, which is the number of jobs at CitiGroup. That 4,200 number that will be cut - well, it's a mere 1.1 percent of the population, they probably have that kind of turnover in a quarter.

But even though I spent most of my career in smallish companies - in the 20 - 750 employee range - I did do a couple of stints in what were, by my standards, largish firms: Wang (30,000 employees at peak) and Genuity (not quite sure how many, 2,000-3,000 maybe).

Whether the company I was keeping was large or small, I lived (mostly) through dozens of lay-off rounds, and they were not just quantitatively different (4 people losing their job rather than 400, let alone 4,000), but they were qualitatively different as well.

In small companies, you got the sense that something was going on: long faces, closed door meetings, etc., but typically nothing was announced up front. So employees might speculate, but unless they were in the know, they didn't really "know" the timing or the magnitude.

But we were generally pretty good at figuring out the "who." First round head-rollers tended to be those of the misfits and the generally disliked (unless they were clearly stellar performers, which wasn't generally the case). In later rounds, those laid off were likely to be those who'd made a recent dumb political move (say, going over your boss's head to make the case that you should have his job - something which I actually witnessed) and those who were less well connected to core functions or the core network (so there was no one to protect them).

At Genuity and Wang, things were different.

These were both public companies, and the lay-offs were typically announced well in advance - usually tied to piss-poor quarterly results. So we all knew the magnitude and timing.

Let the speculation begin!

Nothing cut into productivity like knowing a lay-off was coming. Rumors would start to fly, and you tended to spend a good portion of each day with different sources of rumors.

They were only laying off people in certain functions. People working on certain products. People above (or below - mostly below) a certain level. People hired after (or before) a certain date. People in certain geographic locations.

Of course, some of these may have made sense: cut non-profitable or end-of-life products; close down some facilities. But, in general, lay-offs tended to take the easy way out and were be pretty much across the boards.

At Wang, when impending lay-offs were announced they always said that the lay-offs would occur before a certain date - which we correctly translated to mean they would occur the day before that certain date.

While the rumors swirled, I'd say that the average workday of real work, by the average employee, decreased by about 50%. As lay-off day got closer, that number started moving up. By the time the pallets full of "personal effects" boxes showed up outside the cafeteria at Wang HQ, work-work was down to about 20%, because at that point we knew how many people in our facility were going to get hit. (Each person let go was allocated three boxes, so we could count the number of pallets, which each held 200 flattened down cartons as I remember, and do the rest of the math.)

A week or so after the pallets arrived, they were divvied up and placed next to the admins' cubes. Thirty cartons next to your admins' cube meant 10 people in your group were getting the hook.

Time for a full work stoppage.

Once it was time for a full heart stoppage: on the eve of the Great Wang Lay-off of December 1989, a fellow on my floor (but in another Tower) had a heart attack and died at work. I didn't really know this guy, but one of my friends worked in the cube next to his, so I knew who he was. We never did find out whether he was on the hit list or not.

Most of us at Wang worked in cubicles, but the rule was that no one would actually get laid off while in their cube, so someone would come, tap you on the shoulder, and walk you over to one of the closed-door offices on the periphery of the floor. (One guy in my group was from Russia, and he told me that when they came for him he felt like it was the KGB.)

When there was a mass lay-off at Wang - and most of them seemed to be plenty massive by my standards - people would stand on their desks, heads above cube-top level, and broadcast the names of those who were being let go. "They just came for Alice." "They just took Jay."

If it hadn't been so painful, it would have been pretty funny.

Buddies were assigned to help the goners pack up and haul their three boxes to their cars. Tears. Hugs. Nervous laughter. Cursing. Promises to stay in touch. (When my friend Cathy was laid off, she rolled down her car window and spit at the Wang Towers as she left the parking lot which, nearly twenty years later, still makes me laugh.)

There'd be some sort of watering hole gathering in the evening. More tears, hugs, nervous laughter, cursing, promising. "We're the lucky ones," the folks laid off would say, but while this was always true on one level - a foundering business in real trouble is not a fun place to work - it was so patently false on another.

Who wants to be the one just labeled expendable? Who wants to have to go home and face the family and tell them that they lost their job? Who wants to collect unemployment and have to look for a new job under involuntary separation circumstances? Who wants to have to be the new kid on the block, find a way in somewhere, new lunch buddies, etc?

Yeah, it has a way of working out, but that's not what you're thinking when someone else is chipping in for your Bud Lite because you're the one who's going to have to stretch that severance pay.

Back at work, within a few days, things would soon fall into the "new normal" routine.

Then there'd be the next bad quarter, the next job cuts announced, the next round of speculation (and the attendant productivity hit)...

I can't pretend to really know what's going on in the minds of rank and file employees at CitiGroup, but I think I have a pretty good idea. It's not pretty. It's not fun. It's not easy.

And, as I believe has been proven, trying to right a company by hacking at expenses and lopping off heads doesn't really help save the day.

Best wishes and my sympathies to the CitiGroup folks who have a rough couple of months ahead of them.

______________________________________________

Post script:

I don't know what Chuck Prince at CitiGroup's walking around money was when he got fired, but Stanley O'Neal at Merrill got a farewell gift package worth $167M. Okay, it wasn't all cash, but let's pretend for a moment it was. They could have gifted old Stan with $67M and written a severance check for $100K to each of the 1,000 employees who lost their job.

Explain to me again why the world doesn't work that way?