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11.03.08 Increased Workloads Can Lead to Worker Unsatisfaction  By Dan Morrill As companies continue to cut staff, you have to give the work to someone, which could lead to worker burn out. This can also lead to a lot of worker unsatisfaction, which can lead to more attrition than the company initially expected or wanted. As more and more companies lay off people, the work load is not going to change at all, if anything the work load is going to increase for those people who are left behind. That can be a real issue when dealing with worker burn out, and worker dissatisfaction with their current employment. While this might not be the best time ever to go find a job, there are still thousands of open positions available, so people do have a choice. As we try to balance work and life, work is rapidly becoming something that folks just do not want to do, they are working out ways to become more independent, either as a contractor, or self employed. The more interesting part to all this is that as these people leave the work force, they might not come back if they are successful at being independent. That means the pool of available candidates will continue to shrink while the work continues to grow. Hiring standards and practices are changed, and while you might have gotten rid of 30% of your low performers that does not mean that the work went away. They did something for the company, and now you have to scramble to find either a lower cost replacement worker, a contractor, or push the work off onto someone else who is already fully engaged with another project.
Firing always has its downside, not only do you increase the work load on those who stay, but you risk burn out leading to additional attrition. You also lose a lot of valuable information that the person held in their head. While Knowledge Management systems might help, most of us keep corporate information in our heads; we will not willingly let it go. If you have ever tried to comb through someone else’s source code, you understand the problem if it is not fully commented. Before you go on a company wide purge of low performing employees, it is very important that you take a look at exactly what they are doing, and work out a way to make sure at least some of the corporate knowledge is captured. This can be done by teaming the soon to be fired employee with someone else to help in an under cover transition of the project. There are also other ways that a company can try to capture internal knowledge that is important for the project to be successful. The worst thing that a company can do is lay off staff without an idea of what they are doing for the company. Most firing processes I have seen only look at the performance evaluations of people, without names or position associated with them. Most of the firing board makes their decisions in the dark, which is good for keeping lawsuits at bay, but at some point in the process this boils down to a person, who is doing work, and reallocation of the work can be a very difficult thing to do for some managers, and some employees. Comments About the Author: Dan Morrill has been in the information security field for 18 years, both civilian and military, and is currently working on his Doctor of Management. Dan shares his insights on the important security issues of today through his blog, Managing Intellectual Property & IT Security, and is an active participant in the ITtoolbox blogging community. |
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