Are there warning signs if a company will be laying off their people?

"Warning Signs Of Corporate Doom"

https://wiki.c2.com/?WarningSignsOfCorporateDoom

There are many interesting warning signs on that list.

> Toilet paper quality suddenly drops This is not a joke. Most of the time, the company buys supplies, rather than the hired cleaning firm. If they are skimping on TP, it is a bad sign, since it is a very minor expense. I once worked at a place that was constantly running out of TP. Massive layoff a few months after this started happening. Our company has just stopped the paper hand towels in the toilets (we still have air dryers)!(Cash flow)

I've seen this happen at a startup I worked at. About a month after they started skimping on the TP (and drinks, random supplies, etc) everyone discovered one morning that the building was locked and management/owners couldn't be reached.

Not replacing people. Organisations will sometimes stop hiring people in the hopes that natural attrition will prevent layoffs or at least reduce the size of the layoff.

If you're part of a larger corporation, observe both your own units profits and revenue, and that of other units. Know where it comes from, and how long it can be sustained.

Circa 2009 we had a layoff (we weren't the only ones) despite being profitable. The warning signs were obvious (to me at least, everyone else seemed caught off guard). We were profitable, but our most profitable project was coming to a close (a massive retrofit project for US military vehicles, they'd nearly finished retrofitting the entire fleet so the amount of work was due to drop massively). Despite that, we were still very profitable but without the same margins. The other divisions, however, were all losing money. Corporate didn't want to lose them, it was better to scale them back and rebuild after the recession (a large amount of other revenue our division was in both new construction and renovation of office and industrial buildings, which obviously weren't happening as much in 2009). Knowing where money comes into the corporation is critical for understanding how national/world events will impact it.

Depends on the size of the company I guess. My observation in big corporations is that the layoff communications are delayed until the last possible moment so that they can keep the work going while the restructuring is being executed on a higher level. This makes sense from company's perspective but is hardly right towards the employees. For a startup, I guess it's up to the founders to decide how they want to handle the situation. They can be right open and let the employees know bad times are coming and eventually rely on the employees to get out of the crisis or they can keep the bad news until the last possible moment. Generally, the signs are: delayed salaries (for startups), less and less requirements towards your tasks and performance, detached management, lack of communication for future objectives and plans, reduction of "unimportant meetings", no plans for upcoming company celebrations (like Christmas), etc.

We had an awful set up at a major company where you were told to wait at your desk and you might receive a phone call (days of desk phones). It was pretty clear what that phone call would mean. People were joking about it and prank calling people would thought they were about to get kicked out! It was pretty awful.

I got the phone call!!! It wasn't what I expected, I got the choice of either redundancy (which I'd secretly hoped for) or reassignment. I took reassignment, figuring it might be interesting and the option of redundancy would probably be available in the future anyway.

Anyway, they moved me to another team for 3 months so they could tick the box of removing a resource from my team and then moved me back. The work was pretty interesting so I didn't care.

After 14 years I did actually get the option of redundancy and this time I took it!

Warning Signs You're About to Be Laid-Off (2015) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10778321

I'd say look at project budgets and promotion.

If the career advancement suddenly stops and project budgets shrink, that could be a sign. My company recently "transferred" (read that as laid off with a position at another company as part of the severance) a couple thousand people. It was a complete surprise even to the managers about 3 levels up (department heads). The only thing I saw in hindsight was promotions were basically frozen and budgets were shrinking.

At my last company it was a huge push from leadership around cost-saving. Also there was a big engineering push (tons of work and features) for a POC for client that hadn't signed a substantive contract with us. Basically it was giant gamble that didn't pay off.

Easy to spot: Declining sales (quarter-by-quarter).

Firing sales people: too much quotas not achieved

Buy-out and mergers: Duplicate roles (HR, common services, facilities mgmt), and restructuration.

All-hands meetings (unexpected).

Change of major providers (health, insurance, etc.)

Subcontractor consolidation - usually 1-2 fiscal years ahead of firing employees.

For smaller organizations: when you see signs that bills aren't being payed on time, or when your employer delays your paychecks. Huge red flags that point to serious cash flow problems.

Multiple departures among mid and upper level management. Usually the departures are puzzling

Projects getting pulled and a focus on projects that bring in money or facilitate lay offs

At least for startups/small companies, delayed salaries is a very big indicator.

When HQ is taking away a lot of its functionality.

The company barely makes a profit