Employees reunite to chew fat, talk jobs

By Stephanie Armour, USA TODAY

Forget about sniffling goodbye bashes. Employees who no longer work together still are staying in close touch, using new technology to create on-line communities and organize reunion galas.

Fueled by the Internet, these corporate alumni clubs are fast becoming a hot networking trend. Some groups have hundreds of members and have annual get-togethers, while others provide career advice and job leads to colleagues who have been laid off.

Savvy entrepreneurs are catching on and cashing in, sending headhunters to reunion parties or starting businesses to help find long-lost workers .

"There's nothing like walking into one of these reunion parties. There's such a feeling of nostalgia," says Glenn Kaufman of Corporate Alumni, a Boston-based firm that designs on-line communities of former employees. "People who used to work with you are a great reference group. You know them, you trust them."

While some clubs have been launched after a downsizing or layoff, others have been started by a few former employees who just wanted to track down their colleagues.

Some alumni groups have T-shirts, logos, mission statements and membership rules -- a formality that mirrors the corporate environment that spawned the clubs.

A number of employees left Cambridge, Mass.-based Lotus Development in 1995 when it was taken over by IBM.

AXLE (The Association of eX-Lotus Employees) -- the formal name for the hundreds of Lotus alumni who have banded together -- was born to help keep many in touch. The club has reunion parties held simultaneously in cities such as Dallas and Seattle.

"Lotus was a very special place for a long time. You miss people you used to work closely with," says Carole Gunst, group co-founder. She's a product manager for Dragon Systems, which supplies speech recognition software, in Newton, Mass. Membership spans the USA. Gail Russell is a former Lotus employee who works for a training firm in Los Angeles .

"It's a matter of maintaining that energy and keeping people involved," Russell says. "It's worth it."

But it's also about power in numbers. At many alumni parties, former colleagues trade business cards as often as stories about the good old days.

And they mean business. Yesterday's co-workers can fast become tomorrow's clients, and former employees have become headhunters who lure old friends to new companies.

"I saw it as an easy way to get a party together, but a lot of senior management also uses it as a networking tool," says Jill Rasco, of Houston, who helped start exPaq, a group of about 270 former employees of computer maker Compaq.

Networking on line

The alumni group has a Web site where former colleagues go to renew friendships and plan a summer reunion.

"The whole time I worked with these people, I never got to talk with them as much as I do now," says Rasco, who now is at Radnet, which provides business to business relationship portals on line.

Many of these groups are cropping up as a way to rebuild connections severed during an era of layoffs, job hopping and deteriorating corporate loyalty. Some are a direct result of company upheaval.

Laid off in March from Santa Ana, Calif.-based Ingram Micro , a group of downsized employees decided to stay in touch and help each other find jobs. They created Career Partners Unlimited, developed a Web page and began networking in earnest.

"We thought it would be neat if we could get together on a regular basis and support each other during this difficult time," says Nancy Madey, of Costa Mesa, Calif. She had been a project manager at Ingram Micro. "I've made friendships with people at the company I didn't even know when I was there."

Adds former Ingram Micro employee Paige Phillips: "We had a Happy Hour where prospective employers could meet with us. We're a tight-knit group. I could call anyone at any time and they'd help me. Banding together made us feel so strong."

While some group meetings may be gripe sessions, many say they've stayed in touch because they miss the corporate culture they once shared. Getting together isn't about getting even, they say, but about keeping up with old friends and good memories.

Cake and company

Roughly 700 former employees of financial firm J.P Morgan are members of Morgan Alumni. They have annual get-togethers, a directory of former employees and a Web site complete with recipes for Norwegian cake and other favorite foods from the company dining room.

"It's people who have good memories about the place and want to stay in touch,'' says Marshall Jeanes, a former bank employee who is vice chairman of Imcor, a Stamford, Conn.-based provider of temporary executives. "It brings back old memories."