To All Managers & Department Heads

When we decided to pay large bonuses to many who didn't deserve them at the year end, we knew that this would impact on our ability to retain our headcount at existing levels. As many of you are aware, we, like many of our rivals, are now embarking on a period of 'right-sizing' to ensure that what bonus there is this year end is shared by significantly fewer individuals, and, more specifically, by those who actually don't need the money anyway.

As managers and team leaders, you have been advised that we are now looking to reduce headcount by approximately 15% across the board. And some of you, aware that the deadline for submitting staff names for the chop is less than a week away, have already started to send in your lists. We in HR have, however, noticed that some managers are nominating staff for the axe for purely performance-related reasons, and some have even looked at future unit revenues and tried to anticipate likely staffing needs in the light of expected work volumes. Commendable though this is, this is not the way to go. Detailed below, therefore, is the selection criteria to be used for choosing staff to be laid off:

Please do not nominate any member of staff who is related to anyone on the regional executive team, or who is a family-member of a large or important client.

Under no circumstances is anyone to be laid off who is likely to run to the media with a 'kiss & tell' story. If in doubt, please retain them on the payroll. This also applies to anyone who is rich or savvy enough to likely engage a lawyer - God knows we could do without any more lawsuits!

In the event that a final choice comes down to a hetrosexual or a homosexual, please keep the gay (it's good for our diversity stats). On the other hand, any PA or secretary who has no basic keyboard skills should probably be put on the list. This also applies to any staff member who may have been originally hired for any other non-business reason.

We would also strongly recommend that managers resist the temptation to simply select names at random. Although we do understand that many of you don't wish to employ 'unlucky' staff anyway, we need to at least give the impression that we have thought through this process carefully. Someone at some stage might even ask us to justify our decisions.

Finally, many senior staff have pointed out that one of our rivals has allegedly been calling all staff into a room and then advising them one-by-one whether they still have a job or not. A lot of you have asked if we could cull our staff the same manner. Although we recognise that this might be quite a hoot for the many would-be Simon Cowells among you, we don't think that terrorizing the staff in this way is particularly sensible at this time of the economic cycle, when we need to get more for less out of those who are lucky enough to remain on the payroll.

April 14th, 2008

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