Author: Crystal Yednak

D uring the summer, Michael Bugielski got the call from the office that no one wants: His territory as a sales representative with a European medical equipment company was being dissolved—along with his position.

    Bugielski dove deep—going to Canada and spending a few days scuba diving through the wreckage of ships that had sunk more than 100 years ago. Back home, he signed up for a nine-week acting class and is finishing his certification to become a rescue diver. Focusing on unexplored interests is part of an effort to keep his mind off darker thoughts and worries.

    “I don’t want to lose my sanity. I want to keep my mind and body as active as possible,” he says. “If I go after those things I have passion about, eventually something will come together. I have a better outlook as opposed to the throw-my-résumé-everywhere approach.”

    With jobs hard to come by right now, some laid-off workers find it makes little sense to get frantic about the employment search.

    Of course, some of the people in their lives may not agree. Bugielski hears the sigh in his mother’s voice because he’s not going downtown every day to apply for jobs in person.

    “The older crowd, like my parents, look at me and feel the way to do it is to wear my suit every day, drive downtown, pay $7,000 in parking and walk from place to place saying, ‘Here’s my résumé,’ ” says Bugielski, 40.

    He says his wife and sisters understand how dejected one can feel after sending out batches of résumés and not receiving any responses. And though he’s taking steps to find his next job, knowing that his savings and his wife’s income as a physical therapist won’t tide the couple over forever, he doesn’t feel guilty about letting his mind wander to other interests, too.

    Pursuing a new hobby or interest during a layoff can be wonderfully distracting—just as long as it doesn’t derail a job search entirely, says Barry Zweibel, an executive/life coach who is president of Northbrook, Illinois-based GottaGettaCoach.

    It’s essential to take care of yourself during transitional periods, he says, because it’s easy to become negative and start feeling like a victim.

    “You need to depersonalize [the layoff] and have it be about something that happened out there, rather than something that happened to your inner core,” he says.

    Emotionally, people push through many cycles after a job loss.

    “Initially, there’s good energy after you get over that first hump,” Zweibel says. “As time goes on, it does get frustrating, it wears away at you. As a wave hits bottom, it comes back up again, then it’s time to renew the efforts, reconnect to the enthusiasm. Sometimes it takes quite a few waves until a job is landed.”

    However, he says, at some point the “I’m just taking a little time off” approach begins to look a lot like denial. “If your spouse starts to get cranky with you, if you notice you’re starting to get cranky or bored by what’s going on … that would probably be an indicator,” he says.

    When Steve DePeder, 48, of Downers Grove, Illinois, was laid off from his account manager position with a small software company in 1999, he threw himself into renovation projects at his family’s 1886 farmhouse. For six months, as he knocked down walls and sanded molding, his mind was stuck on one thought: “I can’t believe I’m unemployed.”

    He had been a decent saver, and the family—he’s a father of two—tightened its belt.

    His wife kept assuring him he would know when he found the right thing. But he was a client of Zweibel’s and recalls the coach pointing out that he was pouring all his effort into the house instead of his job search.

    “I said, ‘It’s my therapy, and I’m not going to sweat it,’ ” DePeder says.

    After about a year, he landed a similar job with a midsize software company. But four years later, on his way to catch a flight for a business trip, he got word that his job was being eliminated.

    This time, he realized quickly what he wanted to do: Rather than send hundreds of résumés to e-mail addresses and get no replies, he changed careers. After a few more months working on his own house, he decided to join his brother-in-law in starting a business rehabbing and renting homes, something he knew he had wanted to do from his previous period of unemployment.

    In the office, the technology improvements he worked on so hard seemed intangible: “You couldn’t touch it, feel it or see it,” he says. “But I could remove a door and put a new door up and see a difference. I could rip a wall out and build a new wall and see a difference. It was that hands-on ‘look what I did today.’ “

    Kathleen Ameche, 49, had been climbing the corporate ladder since college before being laid off almost five years ago as chief information officer of Chicago-based Tribune Co. when her position was eliminated in the merger with Times Mirror Co.

    She says she was in shock. “It was the first time since I was 16 that I wasn’t working,” she says.

    As she tried to figure out the next step, her husband reminded her that she had always talked about writing a book. She decided the forced break from corporate life might be her only chance to do it and had the cushion of a severance package, savings and her husband’s income as a real estate developer and attorney.

    She took 18 months to write a guide for women business travelers, a subject she’d developed plenty of opinions about during years on the road as a consultant. Typing away on her laptop at the DePaul University library, she did feel guilty at times, wondering if she should be working harder to get back on her career path.

    But the first edition of “The Woman Road Warrior” was published in 2005 and sold well among business travelers. More important, she felt that she had used her break from being a “right-brain technologist” well.

    “This is something I had talked about for 25 years and I did it,” says Ameche, who is now an executive for RightPoint Consulting, a Chicago-based technology firm.

    Chris Kerstein, 27, rode out the short period after his layoff on a sailboat.

    Kerstein’s job at Scudder Investments in Chicago, along with those of his co-workers, was eliminated in 2006 during a restructuring after the firm was bought out. Around the same time, a friend bought a Tartan 10 sailboat and was looking for someone to sail across Lake Michigan with.

    “You get laid off, and it’s kind of demoralizing, even if it’s 120 people and it has nothing to do with you,” he says. “You do feel rejected, and to get out there and look for jobs immediately—you kind of feel like you want to take a break.”

    He and his friend took a two-week trip across the lake and spent summer days racing or sailing while living on his severance package. Eventually, he began searching for jobs and had a new one within five months.

    Now a project manager at Chicago-based Northern Trust Co., Kerstein says sailing kept his head straight during his break from work.

    “You’re pretty much just playing around on this expensive toy,” he says, “but because you’re pulling lines and moving, you feel like you accomplished something for the day.”

Aaron Andersen still remembers the bitter day the Starbucks disappeared.

   Andersen, 30, now a budget manager at a Chicago nonprofit, recalls when the mermaid-logoed brew in the break room of his former office was switched to a random offering of whatever could be purchased cheaply in bulk or on sale.

   It was, says Andersen, “really, really bad coffee.”

   A seemingly small thing, yes. But grumbling ensued as employees read the muddy coffee grounds like tea leaves and didn’t like what they saw. When the technology and environmental services company lost contracts, which led to further cutbacks, the subpar coffee came to symbolize larger problems.

   As the cuts grew to include tougher scrutiny of expense reports and stingier rules for business meals and travel, experienced people started leaving the company. “People felt undervalued,” he says.

   Though the tiniest perks might seem expendable during tough economic times, when they get taken away it’s “like throwing salt in the wound,” says Phil Wallner, president of Glen Ellyn, Illinois-based Provident Link Ltd., an information technology recruiting firm.

   Wallner says he sees firsthand the damage done: Disenchanted employees “are more likely to take a call from a recruiter,” he says.

   “The little perks make people feel like they want to go the extra mile to get the job done,” he says. “When you remove those perks and you’re asking someone to still go above and beyond, you’re setting yourself up for some turnover problems.”

   As a consultant who also serves as an interim chief information officer, Mark Cummuta, 44, has witnessed various office dramas provoked by coffee.

   At one work site, the company kept staff supplied with free coffee and snacks to power them through late evenings. As money became tight, that small perk was eliminated and the team of programmers he was trying to motivate lost some fire.

   “The guys would say, ‘We’re out of coffee, and if I have to go to McDonald’s and get a cup of coffee, I’m not going to come back [tonight],’ ” he says.

   Two years ago, a client in California purchased a specialty coffee maker for one of its offices. The machine used more expensive packets of coffee that was high-quality.

   “How come they get the special coffee?” was the refrain heard in other branches.

   “People started grumbling,” Cummuta says. “The other branch managers got upset.”

   The small extras, he learned, tend to be taken very personally.

No more free lunch
   Mike Wolson, president of Naperville, Illinois-based Chicago Recruiters, says he often hears that point from professionals who have decided to look for new jobs.

   The removal of perks can be seen as “a little kick in the face,” he says. “It takes away that extra motivation to give that extra push of energy into the job.”

   Wolson recalls one company that used to provide lunch for employees on Fridays. The management cut what it thought amounted to little more than a small offering of good will, but the impact was much wider.

   “I don’t think anyone left because of that, but I also don’t think the water-cooler talk was conducive to the work environment for a while,” he says. “It highlighted other concerns people had.”

   Indeed, when a company starts cutting back on free subway cards or catered lunches, employees sometimes see it as the tip of the iceberg and expect more bad news to come.

   “It can make them start looking around,” says John Ryan, president of Chicago-based executive search firm RSMR Global Resources Inc.

   “The first reaction is, ‘We’re having financial problems. Maybe I should look for a new job,’ ” Ryan says. “If a company can be transparent enough to indicate that they’re just trying to cut back costs by 5 percent, maybe they can stave off any gossip or rumors.”

The perks that count
   Melissa Dessent, 39, a quality assurance business analyst, says employees at the insurance processing center where she used to work looked forward to Halloween parties, with cupcakes and costumes at the office. Then management changed and the Halloween parties evaporated.

   “I consider that happy, let’s-get-it-done-together attitude a perk,” she says.

   While some may see such a shift as small, it sent a message to her. “That’s what puts people in culture shock,” she says.

   Dessent says some companies “don’t seem to understand there’s more to coming to work than just going there, working for The Man.”

   “It’s the little stuff they give you, like a health club on premises or flex hours or even contributing to transportation costs. Those things really show that the employer cares,” she says.

   Carol Sladek, national leader of work/life consulting for Lincolnshire, Illinois-based Hewitt Associates, says employers must know their staffs to understand what sort of perks, small or large, will engender loyalty. What seems like a minor, smart decision to bosses may come at a high cost to staff morale.

   “Perhaps you take the free coffee out of coffee stations, then you find 95 percent of the population really valued it,” Sladek says. “These fun little perks are near and dear to people.”

   In 2006, Hewitt itself had to handle the fallout from a cutback when it started charging employees for their once-free cafeteria lunches. The perk was costly and only available in Hewitt’s North American offices, so it was deemed unfair to its other offices worldwide, says Tracy Keogh, senior vice president of human resources.

   The news wasn’t exactly welcomed by employees.

   “I’m always very careful in what I give out as a benefit because it’s very hard to take away,” she says.

   HR tried to convince them that they would benefit in other financial ways from the cutback, and many have since become attached to other perks.

   When Renee Zarazinski started her new job as a paralegal at Hewitt, she excitedly told friends about it. The benefits were one thing, but the first perk she shared with friends? The office had a Starbucks, subsidized by the company, where she could get her grande decaf for $1.70. At her old job in the Loop, she’d have to shell out more than $2 for the same cup, she says.

   “I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is great,’ ” says Zarazinski, 53. “It’s so much more convenient.”

   Yet it’s not always obvious which small perks will lead to mutiny when they disappear and which are barely noticed.

   At the former workplace of Andersen, the nonprofit exec, employees also lost their free bottles of apple, orange and cranberry juice.

   No one seemed to care about that. But the coffee episode still rankles.

   “It wasn’t so much, ‘They’re cutting down my income by a couple cups of coffee a day,’ ” he says. “It was, ‘They don’t value me as much as they say.’ “