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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?"
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....
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
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...
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
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!
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
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
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:
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &