Guru

10 Atmospheric change
The confidence, commitment and jolliness on the team is deemed complacent. Strange decisions from on high start filtering down to staff. You arrive at work to find your boss, who usually arrives at about the same time as you, coming out of what has clearly been a long, serious meeting.

9 Closed doors
Management start holding all meetings with the door is closed. They answer telephones but get up to close the door before talking. There are more meetings than usual with folk in accounts and other senior staff.

8 Pointless cost-cutting
The office newspaper is cancelled saving £4 per week. Toilet paper is replaced with tracing paper. There's a "green" push for people to walk rather than drive to the company's other site a mile away.

7 Tighten up on expenses
You attend the annual industry exhibition, which is quieter than usual. Usually the whole team goes but this year it's just you and a colleague. Your boss asks you to try and eat as many free vol-au-vents as possible rather than claiming for a meal. You have to share a room with said colleague.

6 Recruitment freeze
A high-performing colleague announces she's leaving for another job and your boss's boss is seen to smile on hearing the news. Colleagues can't understand why she won't be replaced; the boss's boss can't understand why everyone can't understand.

5 Redundancies elsewhere
Now things really start to hot up. As a man in Houston, Texas might say, "T minus 5 weeks [or so] and counting". Your team hears news of the R word at a similar department to yours, at a competitor or at your biggest client. Office gossips are in their element, some even start to talk like Robert Peston.

4 Reassurance about people's jobs
Management unconvincingly communicate, largely through rumour, that while the economic climate is bad, and that competitors/suppliers/clients are finding it tough, your business, under their capable leadership, is made of sterner stuff and will be largely unaffected. Bosses fail to hear difficult questions and change the subject.
 
3 Calm before the storm
After all the above, suddenly everything seems to be okay. Your team is lulled into a false sense of security. People are almost upbeat. A big new contract is signed and another is in the pipeline.

3 The everyone-must-attend, unscheduled meeting
Your boss asks everyone to convene on the hour in the large room where the directors usually hold big meetings.

2 Unidentified executives and HR people
Your boss's boss, or possibly a bigger boss than that, - one you have only heard of but never actually had the pleasure of seeing for yourself his slightly scary, recently acquired Caribbean tan -  assemble at the front of the room along with someone you vaguely recognise from HR, and someone else who no one knows.

1 The delivery
One of the following phrases will be delivered by one of those people, shortly after a silence finally fills the room:

• "Many of you will be aware..."
• "There's no easy way..."
• "Times are tough..."