Chapter 12: The 2008 Layoffs

Chapter 12: The 2008 Layoffs

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Description

In this chapter, Ms. Hoffman discusses the “most difficult thing she had to do as a manager”: cut 10% of the library’s budget. She describes the instructions she received from the institution on how to make her decisions. She talks about the support the institution provided for you to go about notifying employees of layoffs. She provides advice to other managers facing this challenge.

Next, Ms. Hoffman talks about the areas she targeted for cuts and why. She discusses the impact of this financial crisis on the staff.

She segues to another management challenge: dealing with an incident of violence against a staff member, then returns to final comments on the reduction in force.

Identifier

HoffmanKJ_02_20180326_C012

Publication Date

3-27-2018

City

Houston, Texas

Topics Covered

The Interview Subject's Story - The Administrator; Leadership; On Leadership; MD Anderson Culture; Working Environment; The Administrator; The Leader; The Mentor; Professional Values, Ethics, Purpose; Professional Practice; The Professional at Work

Transcript

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Yeah. That is... Yeah, that’s nice. Yeah. I was wondering—there were a few things—I know that in two thousand... And you left in what?

Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:

Two thousand eleven, February—

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Two thousand eleven. That’s what I thought. Right, I had—

Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:

February of 2011, right.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Yeah. Because in 2009 there was something of a financial crisis, and there were layoffs—

Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:

Oh, my. Oh, it was horrible.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

—so I wanted you to kind of talk about that.

Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:

That probably is the most difficult thing I had to deal with in all my years in librarianship. The budget situation was really, really horrible. And we were all asked to, I think, cut 10% out of our budgets. And so I had to really think hard about, well, what services might we be able to eliminate. I didn’t want to just cut across the whole board, taking a little bit from every area, because that would just deplete resources. I mean, you’d have people who were trying to deliver the same level of service with fewer people to do it. And I didn’t want that burden on the staff. I felt it was better to look at eliminating a service completely, rather than just kind of nickel-and-diming everything. But the other difficult thing about that process was I was told I had to do it in isolation. I couldn’t involve staff at all in that decision.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Who told you that, and why?

Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:

The Human Resources Department, that this had to be done in isolation, and that’s not the way I work.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Do you have any insight into why they made that specification?

Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:

I don’t remember exactly. I just remember I disagreed with it. And, to be honest, I did involve Stephanie in the process. She was my Associate Director, and I felt it important to have another manager, a strong manager, that had another perspective other than my own, to be able to go into that thought process on how are we going to cut 10%, where’s it going to come from. It was tough. It was really, really tough. But the hardest thing was having to sit down with three individuals, very, very talented, good people, and tell them that their positions were being eliminated. Had nothing to do with their performance, but their positions, because the service was being eliminated. That was just awful. Now, I understand they’ve gone through this again, but fortunately Stephanie had some frozen positions that were eliminated. She didn’t have to actually sit down face to face and tell people their jobs were gone. That was really, really hard. And it wasn’t unique to the library; this was happening across the entire institution. It was—

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Yeah, of course. What advice would you give to another administrator who’s looking at having to do that, sitting down with somebody, making the decision and then having those sit-down meetings?

Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:

I’d say—which I did—make use of the resources of your Human Resources Department. They had—they’ve done this before. They provided the guidance, the scripting, exactly how to make it happen, how to conduct the interview. They were invaluable, the one person in particular that was assigned to the library for this, and—

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

And do you have that person’s name?

Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:

I don’t remember her name, but she was a really invaluable resource for me.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

So she provided what words to say, or...?

Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:

Yes.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Yeah, yeah, that can happen, yeah.

Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:

Right. It really was scripted, because you could easily go off and say things that you shouldn’t. With the whole Human Resources, you have to be very careful what you say and how you say it. And so they provided the scripts to use. That still didn’t make it any easier, but I’d say use the resources you have available. Don’t try to go it alone. Why they told me I had to do it in isolation, I don’t know. They didn’t want word getting out. I know that was one thing. And if you tell one person, you risk something getting out. But Stephanie was my Associate Director. She also—her knowledge and skills completed mine, so I knew she could see things from another perspective, as well. So, together, we put our heads together and made the decisions that had to be made. So...

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

What was the—what were the areas that were cut at that time?

Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:

You’re not going to believe this. (laughs) One of the things I proposed was cutting the HRC.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

It doesn’t surprise me, actually.

Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:

It was something I felt could exist, but we just wouldn’t do any development until later, when we had more financial resources available. It wasn’t the frontline service that we needed to provide, so it was the one that would go. And we did eliminate the archivist position. We kept Javier, who was the oral history person, and our plan was to continue oral history but not do anything else with the HRC. We were just going to close that down, which we did. Another position was in document delivery. Because of the use of automation and scanning, there was a position in that area that we felt could be eliminated, and not—the service wouldn’t suffer as a result. And then there was one other... Can’t remember now which one it was. I think it was in serials processing. Again, because of where we were with technology, part of the work that was going on, we eliminated that aspect of the work. But the biggie was the HRC.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Yeah. Well, as I said, it doesn’t surprise me.

Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:

And that’s where all the money was.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Yeah. Of course, yeah. It’s enormously resource intensive—

Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:

And then we did make some cuts in the budget for information resources. We canceled some subscriptions. We almost completely eliminated books. Kept it just to a very bare minimum book budget, so we did take it out of collections, as well.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

What was the impact of this period on the staff?

Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:

I think they were really devastated. I think they understood how I suffered with this, the grieving I did, but I think they were all—we were all grieving. We’d not had to go through anything like this. Yeah, there was a lot of grieving that went on.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Was there anything that you did to address that?

Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:

That particular time, I don’t think there was anything specifically. I’ve always had an open door policy. I was there, talked to people. There were some who took advantage of that. I can think of other things, historically, when I was director here, where I did bring in outside help. After I first came, we had an incident where a girlfriend of one of the staff—they’d had a fight—the girlfriend came in with a knife and physically attacked my staff member, and actually inflicted wounds on him. And I did call in help to help the staff work through that, what happened in their workspace, where someone came in with a weapon and inflicted injury on someone.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

And this was in a public space? I mean, did other people see the assault, or...?

Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:

It was not—it was in a public space, but it was in a space that was kind of hidden away, not in the big, big open space, but it was a public space. I don’t remember if there were... There was at least one person that witnessed it, and kind of intervened at the time, called the police, and one thing led to another. But Anderson had an individual, Mickey—her name was Mickey [Devoe sp?], and I can’t remember her last name. She did a lot of work with the nurses. She was a trained, I guess, psychologist. I’m not sure what her training was. But she did intervention work. And so we went through several sessions with the staff together as a group, all of us together, working with her to process that. So that was a tough time.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

I bet.

Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:

And that was—I was brand new. I hadn’t even been here a year when this happened.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Oh my goodness, this was very early.

Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:

And here they were, the staff trying to adjust to new leadership, change, and then we have this incident, so...

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Yeah, I’m sure people were saying, “Oh my gosh, what’s happening here.” (laughs)

Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:

Right. So that takes me back. So that was a time I really did bring in outside help. When we went through this reduction in staff, or reduction in force I guess it was called, RIFF, I had staff meetings where we openly discussed whatever people wanted to express, but that was really all I did.

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Chapter 12: The 2008 Layoffs

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