If your business is slower and you are finding your people have time on their hands, before you start axing your payroll, causing deep trauma to your company and losing a lot of history and knowledge, put them to work doing the stuff there was never time to do when you were busier.
If you don't know what 5S means, look it up. It is one of the foundations of the quality disciplines. It means round up all the junk that has accumulated in your offices and production areas, either get rid of it or find a home for it. Then , organize everything that's left so that everything has a place and every place has a thing, spit shine the place from floor to ceiling and figure out how to sustain that degree of organization so your people don't ever wander around looking for stuff ever again. A useful little book is Putting 5S to Work. It's mostly about factories, but the principles apply to any business. It also appears to be out of print and used copies are absurdly expensive, so you might try some of the other documents available, which I haven't read.
How about training. Our employees are typically abysmally ignorant about business: where does money come from, where does it go. This would be a good time to invest in your employees. It will pay big dividends.
You might legitimately ask, what about cost when I'm not making money? If you absolutely have to trim payroll, the worst thing you can do is do so by seniority. The real criterion is: who is adding the least value. You have employees who are reasonably effective but their personal lives are a mess. They are constantly taking time off to deal with one crisis or another. This would be a good time to get that noise out of your company system. You have employees who are not very productive but you hired them when things were humming and you needed bodies and it didn't matter too much that they didn't add much value. They added enough at the time. But if the game has changed, so must the criteria. Send them on their way.
The message you will send to the company will be very clear. Adding value = job security. In other words, trim the fat. When you treat your employees like inventory (LIFO), you send a clear message that job security = survival skills with no direct correlation to adding value.
If you have to trim, don't trim to your current production capacity. If you do, you'll have no headroom when things improve (which they will). Use that headroom to train and put a 5S program in place. You'll be glad you did.
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