Three Ways to Cope with a Looming Layoff

I’ve been surprised by the number of people I’ve met who, like I did, quit their jobs after the recession took hold last year. Of course, most people don’t want to quit — or can’t. For many of those job-keepers, the prospect of layoffs is all too real, even as the recession officially winds down. They want to know what they can do in the face of the ongoing threat, and my fellow blogger Daisy Wademan Dowling provides useful tips in her post “How to Sell Yourself When Your Job’s at Risk.”

But there are also less self-promotional things you can do to feel more stable when the future seems shaky. The methods I’ve seen work involve, oddly, a bit of risk-taking, or at least breaking your routine. By initiating your own disruption at work, you can make externally driven change seem less threatening. Here are a few small things you can try:

1. Choose a task to do your own way. Chances are, like every frontline worker and manager, you have at least one routine duty that you always perform according to a tacitly understood set of expectations. You don’t openly question the method because it seems to fit the M.O. of the organization or of the folks in charge, even though there’s no formal rule about it. Identify one such task and start doing it the way that you always thought would make more sense. The change obviously should not be something that amounts to insubordination or that would create chaos for coworkers. But in a climate where layoffs seem imminent, there can be room for small, refreshing changes of this sort. Your initiative might even be praised. And if it isn’t noticed at all, you’ll have at least shown yourself that change wasn’t as risky as it had initially seemed to be.

2. Rethink your order of operations. Organizing your workday is obviously more of an art than a science. You’ve probably settled into a particular pattern because it fit the bill when you started the job or because it was just easy to adopt. But when your pattern is threatened by external disruption, you can mitigate anxiety if you shake up your own world before it’s shaken up for you, even if at first that seems like a hassle. Change the sequence of things you do each day, and feel what it’s like to inhabit a new, self-authored routine. If your job is one that requires reacting to others, change the way you react so that things feel fresh to you (without acting fresh toward other people, of course).

3. Lay yourself off for a day. Ok, not literally. But take a day off in the middle of the week (Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday) and inhabit the workaday world outside the office as an observer. The key is not to run errands or get some other practical thing done, and certainly not to sit (or work!) at home. It’s to actively look around you and soak in the big picture when most everyone else is focusing on minutiae. The hum of the world when others are at work and you are not can be a liberating one to hear. And it can make the prospect of a layoff seem much less scary. Bring a souvenir back from your outing and place it on your desk or your wall at work. Let it remind you that you were out there already and that you can, if push comes to shove, go out there again.

What little things are you or people you know doing to cope in the face of potential layoffs?