In May, Portola Packaging announced it would lay off 78 employees at its upstate New York plant. Last week, the company sponsored a job fair with about 20 area employers. The goal: to get those downsized workers new jobs.
Getting laid off is never a good thing, but smart companies know there are ways to cushion the blow.
"Many of the people there had extensive service time with us, and we wanted to make sure they were treated with dignity and respect," says Jeffery Swoyer, chief human resources officer at Portola, a Batavia, Ill.-based manufacturer of plastic beverage caps.
Portola isn't the only employer helping its laid-off workers. Other companies offer outplacement services and some even reimburse downsized employees for the cost of getting retrained.
The advantage to employees is clear, but employers benefit too. Helping downsized employees cushion the blow of getting laid off might offset negative press. And it helps alleviates current employees' fear that they might be working for a Scrooge.
Some are more blunt about participating companies' motives. "It's PR," says Celeste Calfe, president of the Association of Career Firms and owner of Calfe & Associates, an outplacement firm in Pittsburgh. "They're ensuring that employees go out and say, 'Yes, I lost my job but they gave me this.' Also, it's proven that if a person goes through an outplacement firm, the risk of a lawsuit is reduced dramatically," Calfe says.
Whatever the reason, employees welcome the help. Rose Huehn has worked as a manager at Portola for 21 years. Getting the news that she will be laid off in November was devastating and scary. "I'm not a young person, and my main concern, because I'm in my late 50s, was how I'd be received in the job market," says Huehn. "To hear that we were going to close was heartbreaking."
Portola hired the outsourcing firm Compass Career Management Solutions, and Huehn took the classes they offered on résumé-writing and interviewing skills. She prepped with a job counselor prior to the job fair about how to present herself. And at the event, she got job leads from General Electric (nyse: GE - news - people ) and Saratoga Hospital.
"After speaking with them I realized my leadership skills are transferable," she says. "That's what helped me leave with a positive feeling."
Most employers don't go quite so far to help laid-off workers--they just hand employees a severance check and wave goodbye. Some employers give laid off workers the phone number for an outsourcing firm and leave it up to them to make the call; the workers often don't.
The situation is different at First National Bank of Pennsylvania. In the past six months, the company has acquired two small, regional banks, leading to staff redundancies and several rounds of layoffs. Calfe and her career counselors were on site the day layoffs were announced to help employees deal with emotions and figure out how they would break the news to their families.
Then the counselors move into the banks' offices, so employees have unlimited access to their services over the months before the actual layoff date. (Banks are required by law to announce mergers far in advance, so employees might have several months before they're actually laid off.)
The bank also frequently offers employees a bonus for working through the transition period. During those months, Calfe offers workshops on topics like how to market yourself and how to prepare for a job interview. The classes take place during work hours, and employees are encouraged to attend. They're also allowed to go on job interviews during work hours. Employees receive one-on-one counseling to strategize their next career move.
"Companies tell us that even though they're paying people to go to these workshops, their productivity doesn't go down, even though they're eventually being laid off," says Bill Crigger, president of Compass Career Management Solutions, which arranged the job fair with Portola Packaging. "That's a big concern for companies that make the announcement three months out."
It's not just small or regional companies looking to take the sting out of layoffs. Westinghouse, Alcoa (nyse: AA - news - people ) and Procter & Gamble (nyse: PG - news - people ) offer downsized employees $5,000 toward tuition reimbursement.
Those employees can take a few classes to update their skills or use the funds to change career paths entirely. Companies usually provide workers with a window of a year to 18 months in which to claim the reimbursement.
When Alcoa closes a plant, Crigger and his team are typically on site for 12 to 18 months before the layoffs, helping with career planning. Alcoa offers counseling for the spouses and children of laid-off employees; it also offers an eight-hour course on the pros and cons of opening your own business, with an accountant and lawyer who specialize in small businesses.
"Laying people off is a horrible decision to make," says Crigger. "It impacts lives forever. These companies, though, are going to stay in business, so how they treat exiting employees has a huge impact on surviving employees. If you treat them like dirt, 10% to 15% of your existing workforce will leave. At some point in time, some of these companies will come back and hire--and we have long memories."
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