How to escape coronavirus-inspired redundancy
An office employee receiving dismissal notice at workplace.
What you need to know:
- No employer will want to keep an undisciplined worker under their wing.
- You must be bold enough to blow your own trumpet.
In the modern workplace, nobody is assured of their jobs. Here are some steps you can take to tighten your grip on your current position.
Adopt new skills
“The trick is to keep developing your skills. For example, if you work in the field of communications, you can choose to acquire new skills in digital marketing, or learn about customer service if you are an accountant,” says Perminus Wainaina, a HR practitioner and a managing partner at Corporate Staffing Limited.
Learning new skills, he says, should not only be acquired as a means of coping with the current crisis. It should be part of your career plan.
Avoid procrastination
“Now that most workers operating from home, one can be tempted to put off work, or to procrastinate until the very last moment. If you fall into this trap, you will have only yourself to blame. What if, while compiling the redundancy list, your employer targets workers who failed to produce any tangible results in the period they operated from home?” poses Ken Munyua, a human resource practitioner at People Centric.
Discipline
No employer will want to keep an undisciplined worker under their wing. Always remember that you are a reflection of your employer.
According to Patricia Wadongo, disciplinary history plays an important role when deciding which employees to lay off.
“The likelihood of your name being included in the dreadful list more than doubles if you lack discipline, always cause havoc in the office, are constantly being told off by your superiors, or if you give the company a bad image,” she says.
Toot your horn
This can make or break your career. You must be bold enough to blow your own trumpet. This means that you must let your bosses as well as potential employers know about your success stories, and what you are working on.
“If they don’t know about your achievements and capabilities, how will they know that they need you in their team? Wainaina poses and adds:
Know your value
This is the tie breaker. There are multiple ways in which you can demonstrate your value. It could be by suggesting new ways of doing things, or doing things that help the company improve in whichever way.
