Section Four
Employers also should make outplacement services
available to employees. Outplacement services tend to
stimulate laid-off workers to pursue retraining opportunities and
to relocate. Likewise, they provide opportunities for building
social support. Although the effectiveness of outplacement
services varies by employee level and needs, their role in
providing a base of operations for contacting employers
appears to be uniformly valuable. Additionally, employees’
perceptions of fair treatment are probably enhanced by
outplacement services. Although research evidence has not
definitively established that outplacement programs are
effective in helping workers become reemployed, such
programs may have an additional major benefit of facilitating
employees’ psychological adjustment to the loss of their jobs
and in helping them regain their self-confidence.^72
Other suggestions for carrying out layoffs include
supplying additional training, particularly where declines in
industries have made employees’ skills obsolete; attending to
the morale of remaining employees, such as by not making
derogatory remarks about laid-off employees; pursuing
cooperative efforts with unions to avoid layoffs; and displaying
corporate social responsibility by helping to defray the costs
incurred by the community in which layoffs or a plant closure
are conducted. A final suggestion is to avoid preferential
treatment of minorities and women even if the company has an