4 Job Strategies for Tough Times

What makes a difference in a recession

Scot Herrick, Cube Rules, LLC

ABSTRACT When times are tough, the chaos of work causes us to get lost at sea. We lose our perspective about our work and families. Cubicle Warriors know that tough times are opportunities. Here are the four strategies to ramp up your work life.

4 Job Strategies in Tough Times

Table of Contents
Introduction...................................................................................... 3
Why look at jobs in tough times?........................................................................................3 About Scot Herrick ............................................................................................................4 Your personal finances will determine your success or failure from a layoff .........................4 The number one equalizer to job stress is money in the bank ...............................................5 Saving a years take home pay isnt easy .............................................................................6 How do you get to one-years take home pay? ....................................................................6 Companies dont make personnel decisions, people do .......................................................8 Networking is stereotyped..................................................................................................8 Keeping contact with your network ....................................................................................9 SMART Goals ..................................................................................................................9 Task Management ........................................................................................................... 10 Performance Reviews ...................................................................................................... 10 Going conservative doesnt cut it...................................................................................... 11 Embrace the chaos........................................................................................................... 12 Personal financial security is key ...................................................................................... 13 Business networking will find your next job ...................................................................... 13 Brilliant basics give you the performance rating you deserve.............................................. 13 Put your career on offense................................................................................................ 13

Strategy One: Personal Finances ............................................................ 4

Strategy Two: Business networking finds your next job ................................ 7

Strategy Three: The Performance Review You Deserve ................................ 9

Strategy Four: Put your career on offense.................................................11

Conclusion ......................................................................................12

Thanks ...........................................................................................14

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Scot Herrick

Cube Rules, LLC

4 Job Strategies in Tough Times

Introduction
Why look at jobs in tough times?
Living in corporate cubicles isnt easy right now. There is extreme pressure on companies to simply survive, much less grow and do well in this economy. That translates directly into what happens to the people I call Cubicle Warriors, the people that not only survive, but also thrive working in cubicles. Given the pressure on jobs hundreds of thousands have been laid off in recent months it makes sense to take a hard look at what can be done right now to help you keep your composure and your senses in this tight job market. This report is split out into four segments: Strategy One: Personal finances Strategy Two: Business networking Strategy Three: The performance review you deserve Strategy Four: Getting your career on offense

Looking at the list, you might easily wonder why those are the four big strategies for tough times. Youll find out. I speak from experience. Lots of it.

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Scot Herrick

Cube Rules, LLC

4 Job Strategies in Tough Times

About Scot Herrick
In the classic resume, Ive had a 30-year career in Fortune 100 companies. Ive been in sales, design, project management, a team leader, a manager, technical manager, director and a vice president (albeit in a bank). From individual contribution to managing teams of four to twenty, Ive been in everything from a family owned company to one of the largest corporations on the planet. Ive travelled much of the world in my work and spent the road warrior life catching planes, trains, and automobiles. Ive even suffered two layoffs in my career and learned from both. I formed Cube Rules, LLC, after my last layoff. But Ive been writing about jobs and careers since 2006. Since I love learning, Ive watched and absorbed the lessons of business. So lets be clear about some things: Im not a personal financial advisor, but know the end points of where you need to be with finances. I do not make any claims or promises about the results you will get; humans are not predictable. I am for hire for career coaching, which includes these elements. I also offer classes to career-minded individuals, all of which you can see on my product page. Thats all Im going to say about that.

Lets get trucking!

Strategy One: Personal Finances

OK, I know you never thought personal finances would be the top job strategy in tough times. I can almost hear the disappointment your head and already can hear BORING coming out of your thoughts. But hang with me a bit. Because:

Your personal finances will determine your success or failure from a layoff
Seriously.

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Scot Herrick

Cube Rules, LLC

4 Job Strategies in Tough Times

Without going all Freudian or B. F. Skinner on you, the threat of layoffs, especially the long layoffs we are experiencing right now, continuously hit your stress levels. It raises your stress levels. When you get higher stress levels, a couple of things happen. First, you start to reduce the amount of creativity you have when it comes to any given situation. In other words, you dont see choices that you would normally see when you are not stressed. That means more bad decisions making your job situation even worse. One of those stresses is thinking you have to stay in a job you hate causing more stress simply because you need the money and wont risk a change. Yet, if your finances were in order, you would see changing jobs as an option. Second, stress increases the pressure on the very relationships you need to help you in your life. There was a business teacher once who noted that stress meant that you took out your frustrations on those you love instead of the ones that needed it because you could. Its tough to take out your frustrations on your manager you might get fired. But your family? They are supposed to love you so you take out your frustrations on them. Which, of course, increases your stress. This situation goes nowhere except worse if not stopped.

The number one equalizer to job stress is money in the bank

Specifically, one years take-home pay in a savings account in the bank. Before we talk about how, lets talk about why this is important. In a simplified world, there are three big areas of your life that cause stress. One of them is your job. Another is the relationship you have with your friends and family, the most important being your partner. Finally, your finances cause you stress. Especially not having any money to pay your bills. Or your mortgage. So if you lose your job, you will have great stress. And if, on top of that, you dont have good financial backing with money in the bank, that will cause stress. And if you dont have a job and you dont have any money in the bank, the probability of your relationships going south gets pretty high too. Nothing puts pressure on relationships like the lack of money. Think about the thousands of foreclosures happening right now and the thousands more to come. Plenty of households are mere months from losing their homes from job loss. Right now, in fact, the number one reason for foreclosure on a house isnt from the subprime debacle, but, instead, the loss of jobs and the lack of savings.

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Scot Herrick

Cube Rules, LLC

4 Job Strategies in Tough Times

A job loss combined with minimal savings is a huge loser position for any one to be in. Think about your position right now. If you were laid off tomorrow and received no severance, how long before you wouldnt be able to pay your bills on time? The idea of having one years take-home pay in the bank is so that you have one rock-solid area of your life that you know you can count on. So if you lose your job, at least you know you can live for a full year before having to have another one. It puts a stopgap in place between losing a job and potentially losing everything.

Saving a years take home pay isnt easy

Of course, nothing in life is easy. And getting to this type of financial position will take time it took me five years to get to that position. But waiting to do this wont make it happen. Delaying until things get better is asking for disaster. Even if all you do is get to six months and you get laid off, youll be far better off than the vast majority of your co-workers. Remember, companies are not obligated to give you a severance package. They really arent obligated to pay you any longer than the day you get your layoff notice except through laws. So if you hear about all your friends laid off getting great severance packages and thinking thats what will happen with you, you are risking your financial security to a company that cant control costs and figure out how to keep customers satisfied. Thats whom Id want to rely on. Not.

How do you get to one-years take home pay?

The fastest way to get to one-years take home pay is to start. There are no magic bullets and most people wont try. Cubicle Warriors not only try, they take actions to achieve their goals. Heres some ways to get to one years take home pay in the bank: Put your tax return refunds in the bank Put your bonus payouts in the bank Sell your vested restricted stock and put the proceeds in the bank Sell your vested stock options and put the proceeds in the bank (Im not a fan of holding restricted stock or options past the vesting point; I think I can do better with the money, or, at least not lose it) Pay off a credit card and take the payment and put it into savings Pay off your car and take the car payment and put it into savings Refinance your mortgage and put into savings (not for most right now as 20% of homeowners are under water with their mortgages20%!)

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Scot Herrick

Cube Rules, LLC

4 Job Strategies in Tough Times

Private school versus public school. If feasible, the private school tuition costs go into the bank Simply drop other expenses and increase your savings rate

Now, some clarifications on terms here for one years take home pay: 1. In the bank means in a savings account, Certificate of Deposit, or extremely conservative investments in a taxable brokerage account. I have mine in savings and a Schwab taxable account invested in very conservative, dividend paying mutual funds. Nothing remotely associated with risk. 2. In the bank does not mean your IRA or 401(k). Thats retirement and if you pull money out of those accounts early, there is a huge penalty that makes it even tougher to recover. 3. Take home pay means your take home pay after taxes. I also include other benefit contributions taken out by payroll deductions. For example, I had my home and car insurance taken out via payroll deduction and needed to count that in the totals, as it would bill directly after a layoff. 4. Take home pay includes your contribution to your health care. You have COBRA after a layoff; it is much better now with the Recovery Act provisions. Figure about $500 per month for a family plan now (compared to about $1100 before the Recovery Act). And Im a strong advocate of having the health care; all you need is one accident without it and you will end up with thousands and thousands of dollars of debt. 5. Obviously, if you are reading this from one of the universal health care countries virtually everywhere else except the United States then the health care stuff doesnt apply to you outside of any insurance you pay above the baseline government plan (like in Ireland, for example). I get that saving a years worth of pay is no easy thing to do. But all you need to do is look at how long it is taking to find jobs today, how many foreclosures are coming, and how much suffering weve had to realize finances are important. Houses are not ATM machines and financial bubbles dont last forever. Thats why they are called bubbles. Cash on the barrel was the term from my childhood. In this environment, cash in the bank keeps the creditors and insanity -- away.

Strategy Two: Business networking finds your next job

Youve heard you should be networking, but the truth of the matter is very few people do any consistent work to build and maintain their networks. In fact, it continuously surprises me how willing people are to have people they have worked with leave the company through attrition or layoff and not even bother to get a personal e-mail address, much less a cell phone number.

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Scot Herrick

Cube Rules, LLC

4 Job Strategies in Tough Times

And yet, think about just the people walking out the door through attrition or layoff. Almost all of them are going to be working at a new company in under a year. All of them would be a contact for you to find out what is happening in a different company than your own if you wanted a new job. Or were forced to go find one. Yet, we casually let these people walk out the door. How transactional in our relationships have we become?

Companies dont make personnel decisions, people do

Companies dont find people jobs. People do. Yet we chat around lunch how the company is creating some position, or cutting some position. Or we wonder what will happen to departments in companies when the layoffs might come. But, people make those decisions. And if a decision is made to eliminate a department of people we know, we feel sorry for them, wonder if our job is safe any more (its not), and then let those people we know walk out the door without getting a personal e-mail address or cell phone number. And for as much pain they are going through, their mission is clear: find another job. When they do, will you know? Will you know if there are openings in the company where they found their job?

Networking is stereotyped
Networking is not about handing out business cards after losing your job in a contrived meeting where everyone is trying to find jobs. Instead, I liken networking a term filled with poor connotations to business networking. Business networking tells us a few things about what networking really is: 1. Business networking is about having a like-minded group of people in your industry to share work knowledge with. 2. Business networking means you help others in your network. It isnt about waiting around until you are desperate to find a job and then asking people if they know of any job openings. No, it is helping others now with what you can provide expertise and support in their career. 3. Business networking means you have to have specific skills that your network needs from you. You might be the web person or the one who knows IT infrastructure orand there are hundreds of examples here. But, in your network, you want to be the go-to person known for your personally branded skill.

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Scot Herrick

Cube Rules, LLC

4 Job Strategies in Tough Times

Keeping contact with your network
The key to networking, outside of helping people in your network, is to maintain a consistent communications with the people in your network. Whether that communication is through some social network like Facebook, MySpace, or e-mail (I dont count a lot of social networks as keeping in contact such as Twitter or LinkedIn), or phone calls, consistency is the key. The approach of some networking sites is to break your network down into segments people to contact monthly, people to contact every other month, and people to contact quarterly. Then you contact them. Regardless of how you keep in contact, the important message here is that your network will find you your next job. Helping the people in your network and consistently keeping in touch with them will help you find your help when the time comes, whether thats finding a job or something else youd like help with.

Strategy Three: The Performance Review You Deserve

The third job strategy is to brilliantly perform your jobs basics. Most people consider this to be improving their job skills or some such nonsense. Actually, great job performance comes from doing the career basics right setting up your SMART goals right, communicating your performance, having a task management system and writing your own self-performance review.

SMART Goals
Heres what your competitors are typically doing when it comes to SMART Goals they are simply accepting the ones their manager provides. Worse, they take the SMART goals and then dont monitor their progress against the goals. Worse still, they dont try and update the goals with their manager when the business conditions change and the goals no longer apply. Then they get their performance review and wonder why their manager ranked them so low. This should not be surprising most managers dont know how to write great SMART goals (or, any goals, for that matter). As well, they are too busy to do your follow-up work for your goal attainment. Then they get to the time to actually write your performance review and they look at the goals and see you are working on stuff that no longer matters and never provided good updates for your progress on the goals.

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Scot Herrick

Cube Rules, LLC

4 Job Strategies in Tough Times

So they use the most expedient way to get to goal attainment they guess and get close.

Task Management
Or consider how your competitors manage tasks they dont. They keep them in their head. Or they write them down on a piece of paper that they cant find later. Or, they put what needs doing on one list, but have to look at the list and again figure out what it really means to finish operations report. Including when it is due. Consequently, they miss due dates. They dont remember the critical instructions that tell them the level of detail they need in the report the manager needs. Or the format. Or the audience for the work. When their manager then sees the work, its never right. And once again, the manager needs to step in and fix the work of these hapless employees because they dont have a task management system. Or, the employees without a good task management system take on more work then they can handle. Gone is the negotiation with the manager for what should no longer be done because this new thing is so much more important that what we do now. It always is. Yet, the manager never forgives you not getting the rest of your work completed as well. Unless you negotiate what no longer needs doing, youll get dumped on with work, work longer hours, and wonder why you are so stressed. The kicker? If you dont push back on what no longer needs doing and just finish it all with longer hours and working weekends, you will get even more work. Why? Because you were successful at completing this boatload. A sure-fire way of driving yourself and your family nuts.

Performance Reviews
And when it comes to writing their performance review, your competition punts. As a manager, Ive seen self-evaluations that range anywhere from two comments to twenty pages of stuff (mostly not relevant). In my long career, Ive seen perhaps ten self-reviews where the person provided good information, including a rating. Interestingly, whenever someone provided what they thought was a conservative, accurate rating, I usually raised it. Your objective in your work, outside of gaining job skills and some satisfaction in doing the work, is getting the performance rating you deserve. The performance rating almost always ties to salary increases and bonus amounts. Yet people put in little effort in these critical tasks to maximize your rating and ranking.

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Scot Herrick

Cube Rules, LLC

4 Job Strategies in Tough Times

In addition, the performance review determines the ranking you have in a department against all your peers. In one type of layoff, where the departments simply shrink, the lowest ranked employees are the ones to go. If you are rated successful along with five others in your department, but the department needs to lay off three of the people, the bottom three ranked people go, despite the successful rating. You were successful right out the door. Finally, your performance review is one of the few documents you can take with you if you leave the company. The performance review becomes evidence to your next potential employer about your accomplishments. A signed performance review by your manager and you can tell volumes about your work if you write the killer performance review and your manager uses most, if not all, of it in the final review. So brilliant career basics make a significant impact on your ability to stay employed at your current job, show your tangible results to the business, and provide evidence of your accomplishments to other potential employers. By managing your goals, tasks, and reviews, you will distance yourself from the other people in your department because you are focused on brilliant basics to get the performance rating you deserve.

Strategy Four: Put your career on offense

It is natural in this job market to put your job and career on defense. Hang on to your job, dont make waves, and just put up with crap. After all, what else is there to do? Well, plenty.

Going conservative doesnt cut it

When we get conservative in how we treat work, we start to lose some of the very creativity that makes us good at our job. When we hunker down, we stop seeing options that we would normally see if we fear the loss of our job. Think about it. When you have your water cooler conversations with your teammates, whats their career mode? Are they fearful about losing their job? Are they getting more conservative in their work? Are they talking about the recession and the layoffs happening all over the country? Then they are playing defense. And if everyone else is playing defense with his or her career, why should you?

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Scot Herrick

Cube Rules, LLC

4 Job Strategies in Tough Times

Playing defense is tiring. Draining. Just think about all of the sports commentators who always provide comments about how long the defense has been on the field or how much a team is playing defense. If you are playing defense, you are not scoring. Playing defense works for a while. But playing defense in your career all the time is a losing proposition. Youll come out of the recession no better off than you are now. No new job skills. No new accomplishments. No new business networking opportunities. People play defense because they dont like and embrace change.

Embrace the chaos

In tough times, there is churn. There is chaos. There are reorganizations in departments every week. Everyones job changes because there is more work with fewer people. The natural reaction is for people to become defensive about their work, to hunker down, and to protect what they have. But, churn, chaos, and reorganizations bring opportunity for those that are ready and looking. Cubicle Warriors need to embrace the chaos. When there is more work to do than people, try and get work that will expand your job skills. When there are projects that need doing, do the ones that expand your business networking and job skills. When there are opportunities to give yourself additional responsibilities in areas you want to work in, now is the time to ask. In short, now is the time to embrace the chaos because it gives you the opportunity to put your career on offense.

Conclusion
When there are hundreds of thousands of people losing their jobs every month, thousands and thousands of houses in foreclosure every month, and bailouts given to everyone but the people doing the work, it is easy to get down on ourselves and lose perspective. Perspective is despite the unemployment rate around 10%, 90% of the people are employed (or, using the U6 measurement, 85%...). Perspective is that while people are losing jobs, people are also getting jobs. Perspective is that despite people losing their jobs in the company, there are other jobs that will open in the future.

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Scot Herrick

Cube Rules, LLC

4 Job Strategies in Tough Times

Perspective is that this recession is the worst in decades, will slowly ease, but growth will return. Perspective is that while times are tough, we need to develop the habits and skills we need to thrive when growth returns.

Personal financial security is key

In order to secure that thriving place, we need to have our personal finances in good order low or no debt and one years take-home pay in the bank. Without a strong financial backing for your family, the anchors of your life finances, relationships, and work can all come quickly tumbling down.

Business networking will find your next job

We need to continuously build our business networking opportunities. The jobs of the future wont be well known through companies and their web sites. Or their career sites. Instead, jobs are found through our business network. These are the people we help in their work and people we look to for help in ours. Large, thriving business networks are the key to finding your next job. So dont let anyone you are interested in working with, no matter their position, leave your company without getting their cell phone number and e-mail address. Then keep in consistent contact with them.

Brilliant basics give you the performance rating you deserve

You can do all the work and still blow the performance review. Cubicle Warriors know how to construct SMART goals, negotiate them with their manager, have a trusted task management system to track their work, and write killer self-evaluations. It gives us the rating and ranking we deserve.

Put your career on offense

Defense is not the career mode you operate in during a recession. Its hard to get out of the defensive mindset, but there is simply too much chaos, churn, and management change out there to not take advantage of the opportunities. So get your career back on offense.

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Scot Herrick

Cube Rules, LLC

4 Job Strategies in Tough Times

Thanks
I sincerely hope you find these four job strategies useful and providing perspective to your own unique career situation. These strategies work in good times as well, but right now, they are key to successfully navigating the rough shoals of the economy. Strategy is just strategy, of course, so you will need to develop plans and tactics to implement these strategies in your own life. Most people wont, you know. Thats because they think there is some magic silver bullet that will simply hand them career opportunities. There isnt. Your success is built on your perspective of your career and the tactics you use to implement plans to preserve your employment (not job) security. Get planning! And I hope to interact with you both through the newsletter and on CubeRules.com. Be the Cubicle Warrior!

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Scot Herrick

Cube Rules, LLC