‘WHAT WILL YOU DO?’

LAYOFFS CAN BE HARD, BUT FOR MANY THEY OFFER NEW OPPORTUNITIES

For 16 years, John Roverson worked as the manager of a grocery store in Chicago. “I loved it in the beginning, liked it toward the middle, tolerated it a couple years later and hated at the end,” Roverson says. “Sometimes I wonder why I didn’t leave in the ‘tolerated’ phase, when there were enough signs for me on a personal level that it was no longer what I wanted to do.”

Roverson isn’t the only person who thinks he could have left a job sooner. “But it’s really hard to pull the trigger,” he says. “I could tell I needed to do something else about eight years in, but I kept plugging away.”

Like many in his position, Roverson says he doesn’t waste time beating himself up for sticking around. “I had a house, two children and a stable job,” he says. “You can get a lot of chaos in your life away from work — it could be sick kids or unexpected bills from repairs — so it’s nice to have that stability on the job. But I could have been more proactive when I knew I needed a change.”

Eventually, Roverson’s bosses made the change for him. “Stores are bought and sold, and chains are bought and sold all the time,” he says. “If you work long enough, you’re going to be on the way out when the new owner moves in.”

Time to go

Bryan Craven, an HR consultant in Jacksonville, Florida, likens the selfimposed departure from a company to closing time at a bar. “That announcement for last call goes out, and people act like they have to get in one last drink when in fact they should have Ubered home two hours ago,” Craven says. “I have friends who will nurse a warm beer for two hours instead of being the first person to say they’re going home. It’s like an endurance contest.”

While he admits the analogy might be a stretch for some, Craven suggests taking a look at your fellow bar patrons the next time the clock approaches the end of the night.

“Ten percent of the people are having one-on-one conversations, 20 percent of the people are laughing and joking with friends, and the other 70 percent are standing around with the head tilted toward the TV, peeling the label off their bottle of beer,” Craven says. “They’re bored to death, but they don’t want to go home.”

To avoid that early-morning bar gaze at the rebroadcast of the previous day’s Cubs game — or the obligatory “Piano Man” or “Closing Time” on the jukebox — Craven says people just need to be honest. “You say, ‘I’m not meeting anyone. I’m not doing anything. Why am I still here?’” he says. “As simplistic as that sounds, you should ask yourself similar questions about your job. If your answer is a non-answer, get that resume ready.”

‘Mixed blessing’

In most cases, disgruntled or bored employees would rather wait for someone else to make that choice for them. “When the company tells you to go, there’s no more ambivalence,” Craven says. “Then it’s time to go.”

Roverson says his mandated departure was good and bad. “It forced me to reassess what I was doing,” he says. “It made me think about the bigger picture for the first time in years. It was a real mixed blessing. You get the worries about bills along with the spark to do something new. I don’t know if I would have had one without the other.”

With a compensation package, Roverson says he had the flexibility to go back to school, but that required a move to Omaha, Nebraska, to be near his wife’s family.

“We needed more help with the kids since we were going to be away from the house more often,” Roverson says. “I worked part-time as catering manager and went to school at night to get my degree in elementary education. I’ll be certified to teach next year.”

Lisa Valone says she found herself in a mixed-blessing scenario of her own two years ago, when her company told employees they could no longer work from home, which Valone was doing from her condo near Akron, Ohio, three days a week.

“I’m not afraid to admit that I’m not a winter person,” Valone says. “I hate driving in snow and on ice. I know it’s nuts because I live in Ohio, where it’s cold like 10 months a year, but I hate the winter.”

That’s not to say Valone hates where she lives. “I love it here, actually. I just hate ice and snow,” she says.

Valone considered the 50-minute drive to and from work each day and decided to push back a little on the new policy. “I write marketing copy for an insurance company. There’s literally no reason for me to be in the office five days a week,” she says.

Valone stated her case in an email to her boss that she says might have been “a bit too on point.”

The next day, she showed up to meet with him, only to find her desk covered with boxes. “Coffee filters, K-cups, napkins — it was really weird,” Valone says. “I joked around with my friend and said, ‘Is this a sign?’ Turns out it was. They handed me my package before I could clear off the desk.”

Valone found a new job working on newsletters for a benefits firm in nearby Cleveland within four weeks. “I go into the office maybe once or twice a month,” she says. “It’s a pretty good gig.”

For Valone, it was a chance to do more than just write copy. “I get to do some fun, original things, which I had wanted to do for a while,” she says. “But I was in a safe place with my old job, so it was nice to have them throw me out to shake things up.”

Whether expected or not, be prepared for the “opportunity” getting let go can bring to your work life.