KAREN DEVELOS- SACDALAN
Rumination and Anxiety during Downsizing:
How Can Outplacement Services Help?
Karen Develos-Sacdalan is a consultant of LHH DBM( Lee Hecht Harrison- Drake Beam Morin), a leading global talent and transition management consulting firm providing services to private and public companies, and government entities. She is a certified Industrial / Organizational Psychology specialist by PAP( Psychological Association of the Philippines) with fourteen years of HR management practice, and a Psychology professor in Mapúa Institute of Technology. She obtained both a bachelor’ s and master’ s degrees in Psychology and is currently in the Ph. D. in Special Education program at the University of the Philippines Diliman. For comments, you may send an email to: kay. sacdalan @ gmail. com.
With the constant mix of organizational changes that necessitate the interplay of system and human behavior, rumination and anxiety have become some of the natural occurrences present in employees today. By definition,‘ rumination’ or post-event is a response to distress where an individual passively and continuously thinks of the cause of their distress while failing to solve or eliminate the cause( Nolen-Hoeksema et al, 1999).
In the process of rumination, the individual repetitively goes through the reviews of the situation by focusing on the negative aspects of the situation, such as the causes, meaning, and implication of the source of the distress( McLaughin, 2011; Maria et al., 2012). Particularly, it is most commonly observed in companies who are in a state of transition. Previously known as an“ outplacement” service, the entire practice is now termed as“ transition management,” which constitutes of a program designed for employees who are leaving the company. It is this aspect of the employment experience where management needs to be aware that rumination and anxiety among employees does happen and should be managed with utmost care. To do so effectively, there exist career coaches, who are the ones who take the lead in transition programs and help address these ruminative symptoms. They have the appropriate expertise to objectively deal and manage varying degrees of rumination and anxiety during downsizing. Perhaps most importantly, beyond the program designs and strategies of career decisionmaking, a transition management program attends to the complicated and sensitive issues of separation simply for the very reason of being human.
In the process of employment separation, telling the“ big news” is equally daunting in helping employees to move on. Thus, rumination in this stage is undeniably at its highest form. When employees are finally no longer with the company, people cope in entirely different ways. Despite the most well-intentioned plans that management puts together, during the process of termination employees remain confronted by these ruminative symptoms. It is in this light that transition services are usually there to help ease the impact and effectively address issues that may emerge and possibly later lead to the onset of depressive symptoms. As research would attest, continuous rumination of a certain social event will affect the individual’ s memory due to their repetitive reconstructing of the memory for the event so that it could fit their negative self-image and interpretation of social situations( Kandris et al, 2007; Brozovich & Heimberg, 2011). This means that the more individuals dwell on something, they are more likely to remember these events or situations in a bad light even though there was no such intention to begin with.
This however, is not all of it. Aside from employees having to go through the process of letting go, they are likewise confronted with strong feelings of anxiety.“ Anxiety” is generally defined in psychological terminology as a displeasing feeling of fear and concert; it is the presence or absence of psychological stress, since anxiety can create feelings of fear, worry, uneasiness, and dread. During the separation period- when employees typically contemplate or think about their next career options, often times they are at a loss just thinking about what would be the next best move to take. By and large, these employees become extremely anxious, disoriented, and agitated, as if trying to make sense of things( under ruminative condition) and how to move forward without knowing where to go( under anxious condition). Notwithstanding this, both of these conditions, rumination( past events), and anxiety( future events), play an important role that may trigger dangerous mechanisms which may possibly to depression.
In my actual experience in providing transition services, employees who were laid off go through the ebb and flow of emotions while under a transition state. Regardless of whatever circumstances surrounded their leaving, whether these employees had“ hunches” of an upcoming retrenchment, had some level of awareness in the big picture, or were totally clueless,
18 PEOPLE MANAGER I January 2013