Ethical Dilema: Caught in the Layoff Wringer Question 1: Its not about you, its about doing your

job as a manager. Show some courage; pick someone. (What general criteria should be applied to determine who gets laid off? What is your ethical reasoning for this approach?) Among the criteria that can be applied to determine who gets laid off are: 1. Seniority The employees who have served the company for a longer period of time should be retained in the organization. This is because the company has invested more amounts of money and time to train these employees hence it is rational not to lay them off. 2. Implement an Employee Rating System With this system in place, the performance of each employee would be regularly measured. Although everyone in the department may be hardworking, not everyone would achieve high performance rank. Ethically, this allows the employees to be fairly distinguished, measured and finally determines which employee performed lower than the rest, hence is laid off. 3. Employees attitude Another criterion that can be considered is to base the decision on the employees general attitude. Among the factors are employees work ethics, moral, flexibility, team playing skills and job motivation. If the employee is not motivated and is generally difficult to work with, this could be one of the factors to select this employee to be laid off. This is because; having this person around is not productive for the company and also the fellow co-workers. 4. Employees skills Consider each employee in the department to determine if the employee has any additional skills that may be valuable for future projects of the company. This could come in handy for future expansion, hence those without any special skills or their skills are similar to their peers, they can also be picked to be laid off from the company. 5. Employees salary Consider the employees salary to determine if any of them are overpaid based on their usefulness to the company. Some employees are very talented and worth a lot of money, but they are not used to their full potential and are therefore not worth their high pay. Other employees may be receiving a very high pay but are a key employee in the company and are therefore worthwhile to keep on. Those which are not contributing much to the company but are paid high salary could be the potential candidate to lay off.