In today’s economic environment businesses are making tough decisions. They are laying off people at a great rate, cutting back on non-essential costs, and pushing through price increases on their customers, all in an effort to improve the overall performance of a business. Banks are a great example of this, they are looking for any way to increase their revenues through new fees and charges while quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) laying off people. These businesses, especially the public ones, have no choice. Their share prices reflect the belief by shareholders in higher and higher returns from these companies.
However, while these changes in an organisation can be difficult for the employees (no one likes to see collegues lose their jobs), senior management often dont cut back on their pay packets or their perks, thereby creating an us and them culture in a business. If senior management don’t walk the talk, they run the risk of undermining the culture of a business.
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The cold hard reality of life for all businesses is that, from time to time, people need to be let go.
Recently i chatted with one person that was made redundant. Her description of the process was “I was notified I was being made redundant, and immediately frog-marched out of the building. I wasn’t even given the opportunity to collect my wedding photos off my desk. It was all rather disrespectful.”
The above is an example of a company that is not approaching the letting go of people in the right manner. How should companies handle this most difficult of times?
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I recently wrote an article on one of the other blogs that I run in which I gave my view on a market and how the players are performing in that market. Now the article was meant as a wakeup call for one of those players who I thought had become a little lazy however they took it as a slight against them.
This got me thinking about how you should give feedback and what could happen if you happen to take it as it is meant.
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A topic that is often talked about in management magazines and books is communication. It seems that an enormous amount is written on the topic yet management time and time again get it wrong. I was chatting with a friend today about his work place and he commented that people are anxious and communications are not flowing.
This got me thinking – what are the do’s and dont’s of great communication from management to the employees.
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Have you ever had the situation where someone who reports to you resigns and you try to talk them out of it? I certainly have and i have also tried to talk them out of it … often successfully. However, is this the right strategy or should you just accept the resignation and move on?
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I recently heard about a manager who called all his staff in for a meeting about the future of his part of the business. As he went through the presentation, he talked about a new, more efficient structure. The problem was, the new structure left off a bunch of existing people. These existing people immediately asked “where am i”. To their surprise, they were told that their roles where no longer needed and the manager wasnt sure if they would have a job after 30 June. Now this doesnt appear to be the smartest approach to the problem of how to tell someone they dont have a job any more. What is the impact of this approach and how could that manager have handled it better?
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I have just stumbled upon an interesting blog posting from Dublin, Ireland. In the posting by Jason Roe, he claims that he found a bug in the Ryan Air site that displayed a zero price for an airfare after the user completed a couple of less than obvious actions. While bugs on websites are nothing new, it was the response by people within Ryan Air (including someone within the PR team) that makes his a fascinating case study on how not to deal with blogger.
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Businesses around the world are going through tough times as the world’s economy continues to struggle. In these tough times, business have to make tough decisions – often letting go of key people. In making these decisions, it is important that the people in the business understand why the decision is being made, in particular what events have led to that decision. However, this openness and transparency is often very difficult for management. Therefore, the result is that businesses become plagued by fear and rumour, thus leading to a slowdown in efficiency and effectiveness and therefore more layoff. How can management break this spiral?
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The following artice was recently published by Alaine Fontaine on his blog. I found it an interesting article and thought i would share it with you.
A couple of days ago, after a tough day, I had a small discussion with one of my developers at work. I asked him to show me some document on his PC, and it took an awful long time for him to open it up because he mapped a network share on his private laptop he brought to work, and his laptop somehow stopped responding. My reaction was to say that this was an unacceptable loss of time and that I would think about no longer allowing people to bring their own gear to work.
Whilst I was driving home, I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that this was an emotional decision and that it felt wrong. Now that I took some time to think it over, I am sure that this is not what I will do in the future, but rather the opposite! I will encourage people to bring their own stuff to work, and even more than that…
In short, this concept is called BYOC – Bring Your Own Computer, and this is not something I invented. It is currently actively applied by several big companies, like Citrix, and Microsoft, in a way that I consider as very smart.
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In the first part of this series i looked at some of the more hard core challenges i am facing in building a new business. In this entry i want to explore some other softer lessons being learned as we launch our new business. These lessons cover selection of people, the culture we want to create, our approach to working and most importantly having fun.
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