How to Cut Pay, Lay Off 8,000 People, and Still Have Workers Who Love You

How to Cut Pay, Lay Off 8,000 People, and Still Have Workers Who Love You
It's easy: Just follow the Agilent Way.
Tuesday, January 22, 2002
By Daniel Roth

At about 9 p.m. on Oct. 15, Cheryl Ways' office phone rang with a call from her husband: "What are you still doing there? Come home," he begged. Ways, a 30-year-old IT worker at tech giant Agilent Technologies, told him she'd leave soon. Then she went back to work. A half-hour later, she shut off her computer and walked down Agilent's darkened corridors. It was hours after most of her co-workers had left, hours later than she typically stayed, and the last time she'd do it in her career.

Three weeks earlier, Ways had been laid off. In that, she was just another statistic in a truly dreadful year for the paycheck nation. According to outplacement firm Challenger Gray & Christmas, corporate America announced nearly two million job cuts in 2001, the most since Challenger started its survey in 1993. Agilent, an $8.3 billion spinoff of Hewlett-Packard, had been hammered not only by the downturn in the economy but also by the downfall of the telecoms that were once big buyers of its chips, electronic components, and testing and measurement devices. So Ways' getting caught in a downsizing isn't surprising. What is surprising is the manner in which Ways left: not by spending her lame-duck days updating her resume on company time or prying the A's off office keyboards, but by working harder, longer, and with an intensity that rivaled the most productive periods of her five years at Agilent and HP.

The answer to why she did it--and how Agilent was able to wring such performance and devotion from tens of thousands of employees working beneath an ax--provides a lesson for all companies struggling to slim down in these post-boom years. In many ways, Agilent had a head start: It had worked hard on the way up to gain its employees' trust. But on the way down, Agilent has also made a series of smart moves involving good management, good planning, and most of all, empathy. In interviews with dozens of current, former, and soon-to-be former Agilent employees, almost no one had a bad word to say about the company. Which is how Agilent was able to slash, cut, and downsize its way to No. 31 on this year's list of the Best Companies to Work For.