Christina Herrmann has worked as a C-level human capital executive in professional services firms for the past 13 years, primarily in the legal industry.
In her roles she has been the architect of transformational change including process improvements, benefits optimizations, and enhanced talent acquisition and development.
Christina earned a BA in psychology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan and an MBA from the European School of Management & Technology (ESMT), Berlin, Germany. Christina is also dual certified as both a Senior and Global Professional in Human Resources (SPHR, GPHR).
More from Christina…
Christina has dealt with layoffs and downsizing during her career. She knows that how a company manages it will be different depending on the business and the situation. She shares with us her process of taking on a reduction in the workforce.
“If you are undertaking a RIF, it’s because it’s clear that the personnel levels within your organization outnumber the needs of the organization to run efficiently and as a profitable business. You essentially have more personnel than you need.
So, you have to first conduct an assessment of what the business needs are and then make a determination. These are the business needs, so what are the appropriate staffing levels for these business needs? When you determine that your staffing levels are too high, then you go to the business unit view. You have to look at each business unit- finance, marketing IT, etc.- and say within this business unit, are the staffing levels appropriate? You could be overstaffed in finance but understaffed in IT.
You go the next level down is the business unit. Once you make a determination within the business unit that you are overstaffed, then you have to go to another level, which is called your decisional unit. Within your decisional unit, what you are looking at is job classification. Let’s just say with finance that we have way too many financial analysts than what we need. Once you make that determination on the position or the decisional unit, then you go to the next level. How are we going to make the determination as we know that we’re overstaffed here? How do we make the determination as to how we make cuts?
Then, you just sort of develop your criteria. What we need in our organization to move forward is this particular skill, this particular performance, and you just kind of go down the list, establish what your criteria is. Then, you apply it to the people within that decisional unit. If you find that you have similarly situated individuals who both meet that criteria, but you only need one, then the next layer is to look at what’s going to be the tiebreaker. Will it be seniority? Will it be performance? You have to have some criteria that’s going to make the determination as to which of those individuals ultimately is going to be the person that you separate from the firm. This really is a decision tree that starts globally with the organization works its way down granularly to the individual people within the organization within the business unit.”
