Fewer Employees + Same Work = Higher Productivity

LiamRandall writes "Time magazine has an article discussing the effects that recent layoffs in corporate America has had on remaining workers. While I'm glad that I haven't been laid off (like 1/2 my group) I'm overloaded with all of my new responsibilities. On one hand I feel very fortunate to still have a job- I feel some what guilty complaining given that the computer industry is second in layoffs. While some former coworkers of mine got the axe because upper management didn't understand what their contributions to the company were, others were dead wood anyway. The Chinese symbol for crisis is danger + opportunity; in these turbulent times do you find yourself rising to the challenge or being overloaded with responsibility? Is your to-do list growing exponentially? What new work are you faced with and how are you dealing with it?"

Comments

Employees vs Shareholders

[clickety6]

Seems to be a vicious circle:

Shareholders no longer want long term growth and stability, they want profits and dividends and they want them now! When they see dips, they panic and demand action.

Companies see only one way to make short term gains - they "sell off" their easiest asset to drop - the employees.

Employees levae, taking knowledge, expertise and experience with them. Remaining employees have greater stresses and workloads, so productivity drops, some leave, some gets sick.

So profits drop, shareholders demand something be done NOW and so....

Re:Employees vs Shareholders

[rjstanford]

Shareholders no longer want long term growth and stability, they want profits and dividends and they want them now! When they see dips, they panic and demand action.

Who are these mythical "shareholders" of whom you speak? In reality, they're everyone who has a 401(k) or other investments. Its funny how many of the same people (not a personal remark against the original poster, just a general one) who complain about employee treatment are the first in the crowd to complain when companies don't meet profit expectations (for whatever reason) and scream for them to do "whatever it takes" to get the numbers back.

Just a thought...

Pros/Cons

[GeckoFood]

Not too long after I got into a position with an employer, part of my teammates were let go, some of them with more experience than me. The biggest problem was that the people on my specific project that were let go were more knowledgable than the rest of us.

The effects on the rest of us were dramatic, and not all of the effects were bad. We all had to rise to the challenge and figure out what the hell we had to do to make this thing go, without the benefit of the in house expertise (BTW, we were enhancing a product we authored in house). There were many, many nights where we were here late into the night, more than once past 2:00am just to figure out what was going on.

In the end, we pulled it off and emerged successful on the project, and we were regarded almost as heroes in house. We are regarded as can-do people that can rise to a challenge, but the cost to get there was enormous. We all were worse for the wear.

I have seen a trend when it comes to layoffs that is echoed in the experience I had -- for some oddball reason, it seems the management likes to trim the knowledge base at the wrong points. It stands to reason that, when letting go a very knowledgeable person, someone else must be trained up to fill the shoes of that person. This, in turn costs more money. Which is better, spending the money on a more expensive employee, and make the deadlines on time, or spend about as much to miss the deadline and train up someone new?

Yes, yes, some deadwooding goes on too, but I have seen all to often the productive ones with a higher salary cut loose solely on the basis of immediate salary concerns. I would be interested to know if others have observed the same, or if it's just been a matter of where I have been at the time...

Overloaded

[JSkills]

Well let's see. I was out of work at the end of 2001. It's a great feeling when you have a wife, 2 kids, and a mortagage. Fortunately, I was able to land a job after a month and a half with a fairly large company.

I was brought in to architect and deploy an ecommerce system. Did I have a staff? No. Could I contract out any of the development? No. It was like this - here's ONE server (running NT I might add), now go build us a system.

So I did. I wiped the machine clean, installed Linux, installed Perl and various libraries, Open SSL, mod_perl, Apache, and then compiled Apache with mod_perl and mod_ssl. I installed MySQL. I installed Tripwire and set up various accounts for people who needed to FTP graphics onto the machine.

Based on the user specs (not written, but vervbally communicated), I designed the entire database schema, wrote all the code for a web-based administration tool, and wrote all the code to launch the ecommerce system for external customers.

The system has been up and running for several months and bringing in over US $20K per day.

Do you think the company's cutting costs? One server and one person who acts as business analyst, system architect, system adminstrator, DBA, and lead developer. Ya think?

A more positive note: After close to a year, I've been granted additional resources (I was able to hire a junior developer) and additional servers. So maybe things are getting better???

At our site ...

[permaculture]

In the University I work at we had a new management regime imposed on us. After some months we brought out a grievance against the worst of them, who was a horrible bully. Astonishingly, he was not sacked in disgrace. The entire systems team left one by one until there was no-one left (for an entire week, until replacements started arriving).

Then, the network started going tits up. Things got so bad the management were relieved of their responsibilities. One of them has now left under a cloud, and the other won't last past Xmas. Some of the original systems team have returned. The network is steadily improving to pre-management change levels. We have been vindicated!

I would hope it's obvious

[AAAWalrus]

It seems pretty obvious that that would be the case. Imagine 5 computer programmers, worked together through the dotcom bubble, with high-paying secured jobs. Life was good - not terribly swamped in work, maybe surfed the web a little too much on the job, but still managed to get work done. The programmers, being the introvert sort, never really speak up about how their jobs were important, that what they were doing really mattered to the company. No need to - they did their work and the company was doing well. They just assumed that other people understood that they were contributing.

Then the bubble bursts, economy's hurting everyone, layoffs start at the big companies. Our 5 programmers aren't worried - their small company is still running strong.

Suddenly two bad quarters in a row, sales are down, cashflow gets weak, and suddenly the company is worried about being able to write everyone's paychecks. 2 of our 5 programmers, who might have had 2 or 3 bad marks (previously thought of as "minor") on their performance reviews, get canned. Our 3 remaining programmers start thinking, "Oh crap! I could be next!" Suddenly there's a real push for productivity and visibility from our programmers. Not only were they doing %40 more work, but they now make sure everyone knows about it.

Wouldn't you?

Scary thing is, if a company can scare employees into working harder with laying off a few, seemingly overpaid pieces of "deadwood", it certainly make business sense.

Hits a little too close to home for some readers out there, doesn't it?

-AAAWalrus

It's tough, I'm glad I like my job

[Anthony Boyd]

Well, one of my employees and /. regular, Mr. eDrugtrader, could probably comment at a developer level, and we'll see if he gets up early enough to see this post and comment. But I know that from a management perspective, while we're fairly productive with what we do, we have also had to say "no" to a massive number of projects, including projects that came from the CEO or were marked "necessary." Everyone is frustrated -- our CEO has huge plans, but he doesn't have the staff to do it. Or at least, things are getting done at a snail's pace. One of my employees has a backlog of about 2 years of projects -- great for job security, but it can be frustrating and overwhelming. Here are some bits of the fallout:

• Because resources are scarce, people get nasty in their efforts to trump eachother. If two projects are "urgent" and only one can get done, I have to deal with people running to the CEO and complaining, and often using seniority to force the issue ("I'm a VP, so screw all the Directors asking for your time").
• Because projects are under scrutiny, there is little tolerance for side projects. I know that one of my employees hates the project he's on, and would love to squeeze in even a few 4-hour quick-fix fun projects, but the company counts hours too tightly now. I wish I could fix this, but when you have meeting after meeting to agree on the priorities, there is a point where you make your commitments and have to do what you agreed to do.
• While we may be productive short-term, long-term people get frustrated. They get jealous if they see another group gets our time, and they get jealous if they see one group getting to hire a new employee while everyone else cuts back. The employees get tired of having their time micromanaged. Inefficiencies in scheduling and production are highlighted.
• Finally, although my current job hasn't gotten nasty like this (whew!), I've had experiences at other companies where the overloaded employees who miss deadlines get blamed for EVERYTHING. I've been that employee. It is NOT fun, not good, and a sure sign that it's time to leave. For instance, I can almost guarantee that the employees at Actuate Software are feeling that pressure right now -- highly competitive company, with plently of people willing to scream and blame others like mad. Which only makes a tough situation worse.

Re:Same Chinese symbol for crisis + opportunity

[JabberWokky]

Yeah - that's the thing - the connection is empahsized only in modern literature, often by motivational speakers. Thus the pet peeve by the professor of Chinese literature (who, incidently, was Chinese himself). I'm not saying that it doesn't exist - just that I've seen many places that assert it is a modern jutiposition of a phrase that only had a literal meaning until recently, when the "poetic" meaning was picked up by motivational speakers.

The word "therapist" means someone who goes into your mind, and is made up of the two words "the rapist", but that doesn't have a bearing on the classical meaning of the word, even though anti-psycologist speakers will hammer that breakdown in their writings and speaches. It even has a very poetic feel to it - a therapist goes into very personal aspects of your life if you want them to or not. They are the rapist of your mind.

That doesn't mean that's where the word came from or even that it was a common observation about the word until modern times.

--
Evan