Like most companies in today’s economy, academic institutions are facing huge budget cuts, which inevitably leads to employee layoffs. I heard a story on NPR this morning about how Bainbridge Graduate Institute in Seattle handled its recent 16% budget cut.
Rather than bring in the board of directors and other higher-ups to cut programs and staff, BGI held a meeting with its entire organization and explained that they would need everyone’s help to scale back and meet the new budgetary requirements. After the meeting, each department met individually to determine where they could make cuts. When that process was completed, they had reduced their budget by about 8%. The managers and top officers then took across the board 10-20% salary decreases. When BGI was still short on its budget, only then did they decide to layoff staff.
It turns out that the layoffs went relatively smoothly because every member of the organization was included in reducing the budget and upper-level management publicly took large pay cuts. The employees didn’t feel like cast-offs. They didn’t leave BGI with a bad taste in their mouth, and they didn’t have negative things to say about the institute. They knew that everything that could have been done to save their position had been done.
While layoffs and budget cuts will probably never help a company’s brand, involving an entire organization like this shows the character of a brand. BGI treated its employees with compassion, and that will help them maintain their brand through this economic downturn.
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How many people were laid off in the end? 5-10?
I don’t know. I don’t think they publicly released that info. I’m sure it was fewer people than if they had taken a more traditional approach.
Yeah, I definitely agree with you. Great post.