【正确答案】[听力原文]
A: Hey, I have heard that our company is going to fire a group of people. Is it true?
B: Yes, we have to do this, because you know, it's really a hard time now.
C: Oh, but if we just fire them, the other staff would think we're cold and unsympathetic.
A: That is the point. We need to carry out a plan to comfort the staff.
B: In my opinion, we could give the laid-off staff three months' salary and each a recommendation letter to a comparatively lower-paid position.
A: That is good, and then the staff would see our concern for them.
C: Right, let's think about if there are any other methods to tackle this adversity.
B: OK. I was thinking about canceling all the junket tour and cut down the training fee.
A: It may be useful to some extent.
C: But it is far from enough. Maybe we can stop all the recruiting programme and ask for help from the bank which has strong relations with our company.
B: I'll keep your suggestion in mind, because it is really a good way to save the image of our company.
C: Yes, compared with firing the staff, the other approaches are more humanistic.
A: Let's get down to our work quickly and tackle with the problem together.
Follow-on questions
· If I were the HR manager, I would consider staff's capacity, potential, attitude and the contribution to the company.
· The biggest difficulty I can think of is the employees' repulsion to the company's decision. How we can make them to accept it more easily is really a problem.
· The most influential and direct outcome may be the affecting of the morale and the efficiency of the staff.
· In my opinion, reducing staff would be the last choice to deal with economic crisis, because it can affect the staff who remained and damage the image of the company.
· To go through the crisis, the most important thing to do is to find where the problem lies in and to figure out countermeasures accordingly.