How 'dormant' ties can help after a layoff
Plus: Adam Grant on how layoffs affect a company's reputation
Hello Money Movers,
A research paper out today from employment website Glassdoor analyzes how to spot employer instability and the long shadow layoffs cast on a company’s reputation. Glassdoor was kind enough to send it to me ahead of publication, and I thought it warranted a special send of the newsletter.
I spoke with
, the organizational psychologist, writer, and Glassdoor’s chief worklife expert, about his takeaways as well as tips for surviving a layoff. There’s a lot more to the research than what’s covered below; you can check out it here.
Layoffs kill culture
Glassdoor looked at the impact layoffs have had in the post-pandemic era on worker ratings of their employers. It turns out they can lead to a significant drop in a company’s rating, especially among reviews from current employees, or those who were not laid off. The black cloud can hang for years, with employees still leaving poor reviews two years later.
That’s because a job loss event doesn’t just adversely affect those who are let go—it also massively impacts employees who remain at the company. This is for a number of reasons, Grant says, but mainly because layoffs kill company morale, leave remaining employees anxious and distracted, and plague them with survivor’s guilt. They’re also likely to be given more work and no comparable rise in pay.
That ultimately hurts companies, leading to lost productivity, creating a more risk averse remaining workforce, and often costing them their star employees, who leave for greener, less anxiety-ridden pastures.
“What we see in the data is not only do you lose people you didn’t intend to let go, but you lose your most talented people,” Grant says. “They’re the first to start looking, they have the most options.”
These reasons (not to mention a few others, like bad press) are why layoffs have long been seen as a last resort—until recently. Since the pandemic, the American workforce has seen several waves of mass layoffs across industries, even when the companies letting people go were raking in revenue.
“Too many leaders see people as costs as opposed to assets. They think they’re just removing a line item from their budget, as opposed to undermining their culture.” - Adam Grant
“Too many leaders see people as costs as opposed to assets,” Grant says. “They think they’re just removing a line item from their budget, as opposed to undermining their culture and motivation, collaboration, talent attraction, and retention.”
There are some red flags you can look for if your gut is telling you layoffs are coming. For example, you can check reviews on sites like Glassdoor; if recent comments are talking about exhaustion, fear, or dread, among some other keywords, the study finds those are indicators that layoffs could be on the horizon.
Other indicators include freezing hiring and expenses, pausing raises and promotions, eliminating products or programs, lack of feedback or unreachable managers, and a change in overall management style, among others.
Foster ‘weak’ and ‘dormant’ ties
Okay, but what can you do about impending layoffs? One of the best offenses is a good defense. Or in this case, acquaintance network.
Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter popularized the idea of strong and weak ties over 50 years ago, but his findings still hold true today. According to his foundational research, weak ties, or casual connections and loose acquaintances, tend to be more helpful than close friends or coworkers in securing employment.
That’s because you often have less in common with weak ties than strong ties—and that means they have knowledge of companies, job openings, and connections you don’t.
And while Granovetter’s initial research dates back to the ‘70s, he said in a 2022 interview that weak ties are perhaps even more important in today’s AI-addled job market.
“No matter what kind of big data or artificial intelligence or machine learning that employers are able to draw on, they will never know as much about a person as someone who actually knows them and has worked with them and knows their personality and knows what they do in their spare time and how they approach problems,” he said in an interview with the BBVA Foundation. “There will always be more knowledge to be gotten from personal contacts of individuals than you can get from any kind of informatics.”
AI “will never know as much about a person as someone who actually knows them and has worked with them and knows their personality.” - Mark Granovetter
I’ve been familiar with strong vs. weak ties for a few years now, after reading Meg Joy’s The Defining Decade and writing about it for Lifehacker (le plus ça change). But Grant says there’s a third class of acquaintance that can be even more helpful.
These are your dormant ties, or people you worked with or otherwise knew well in the past, but haven’t kept up with. Maybe this is a manager from your first job who you got along well with, or a close friend from another department.
Over a decade’s worth of research from Rutgers University’s Daniel Levin finds it can be easier to get back in touch with these acquaintances than with weak ties because you had a close connection at one point; they may even be someone you’ve meant to call for a while because you genuinely want to be in touch. There’s history.
But they’ve also been living their life in the time you fell out of touch, meaning they may have “novel and useful information” from the different people they’ve met and different things they’ve learned over the ensuing years, says Grant.
He recommends reaching out to dormant ties and asking not necessarily for a job, but for advice on if a new industry would be a good fit for you or to vouch for your skills to others.
Of course, you can’t just email everyone you’ve ever known for a reference out of the blue. Levin’s research finds you first need to refresh the level of trust between you and your dormant tie. He says these are the three most important elements for reconnecting:
Remembering: It’s important to not only remember the person, of course, but to reminisce with them about your shared experiences.
Catching up: Spend some time updating each other on what you’ve been up to of late. This makes the reconnection seem less transactional and also brings your connection to the present.
Perceiving the tie similarly: It’s important to be honest about the strength of your relationship, and to act accordingly. “Treating someone as a close buddy when you barely knew each other (or vice versa) destabilizes the reconnection, leading to a lack of trust,” Levin advised last year.
Missing any of those three elements can lead your dormant tie to hold back or be reluctant to fully engage.
Grant suggests making a list of weak and dormant ties, and start reaching out to them, whether by email, text, or LinkedIn message. These don’t have to be paragraphs-long missives, but they should be tailored to each person.
“Just reactivating one of those a week or one of those a month, if you're starting to think about a move or having to deal with a layoff, is a great way to expand the opportunities in front of you,” he says.
The best time to strengthen your network is when you don’t immediately need anything from them. So if you have a job but might be looking for a change soon or sense something is amiss, now is a good time to foster your relationships.
Don’t be a taker
Grant advises investing in your relationships by asking people in your network what their current challenges are and trying to use your own knowledge and network to help them.
But the point isn’t to do so in hopes that you will get something in return one day. Rather, do so because generosity should be the norm, he says.
“People are much more motivated to help the givers in their lives than the takers,” he says. “If you have a history and reputation of helping others with no strings attached, if you ever need their help, they’re more likely to be there for you.”
That’s it for now. See you Thursday,
A
P.S. Thanks Christopher Skinner for the illustration!
P.S.S. To share tips, pitch ideas, or provide reader feedback, please respond to this newsletter or email aliciaadamczyk781@gmail.com.
Such a good reminder and helpful for the self-employed/freelance folks too!
Learned so much from this, especially the weak and dormant ties!! Awesome job.