| Efficiency can be seen as doublespeak for 'those who remain must work harder'. It could well be that some degree of inefficiency is a good price to pay for all the intangibles that make for a great workplace that produces great work and attracts talented people. For layoffs to not result in employee disillusionment, actual efficiency must be created - e.g. less people can achieve more with similar effort. The danger is the new wage bill efficiency is actually creating overwork and mounting technical debt that is unsustainable. The decision makers are rewarded in the short term for seemingly creating 'efficiency' value when in fact they may have doomed their business by destroying institutional knowledge and lynchpin employees that were not measured on the balance sheet. The delayed effects are business functionality slowly falters, eventually past tipping points, then cascades to irreversible intermittent faliure. Shareholder value is maximised in the short term and the policy makers leave well rewarded before the negative implications of the decimation are perceived. The difficult questions for companies are : - how to layoff the least ( or negatively ) performant employees instead of a random selection, - how to not have the best employees leave in the wake of layoffs because the layoffs created a culture of fear and uncertainty, - how to maintain the motivation of remaining employees so that they remain aligned with company goals, especially in light of the now increased workload for those who remain. Probably the answer is to share ownership and increase reward with those that remain to increase their engagement. Currently the majority of companies never do this. Certainly the remaining employees have to, at best, raise the overwork with management as a problem whereas the management see it as efficiency. At worst the employee will have to fight their corner so as prove their workload is now unsustainable. Without proper support, it can be, that the employee must cut corners to keep up and trust relationships can become adverserial. One would hope these CEOs have real insight into creating efficiency but in some cases the suspicion is that the real issue is upper tiers who have absolutely no idea how their business actually runs on the shop floor. The wider societal implications are unemployement and a lack of the (perhaps) vital social function the business provided, and the loss of customer faith in the company to deliver as before. |