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Tales of a Trouble Shooter – Downsizing 2+

When Management is not ‘on the floor’ it often costs a great deal of money.

In a previous article I mentioned downsizing. As usual, when it is a large firm, one hires a team of consultants/analysts, (troubleshooters) to do their “investigation’ and ‘research’ to ascertain which employees are inessential to the proper running of the business”

The secret is that what an analyst, consultant, (whatever you want to call him/her/them) is watch for personal calls.

This isn’t supposed to be the whole process, but, (and I write this completely seriously) it is often all one has to do.

In one case a newspaper, needing to downsize, hired a team of consultants and paid them well  to do a review of employees. What they did was move from section to section to locate those employees on personal phone calls.

Those found on two occasions were discharged.

It was assumed that this would be the first quick ‘culling’ of employees and further investigation needed to be done.

The joke was that so many employees were found to be conducting personal business during working hours that there was no need for another step.

The thousands spent on the consultancy team could have been saved if management had been ‘on the floor’. But the manager was sitting on his throne in his office.

Had he moved about, had he even asked his aide to move about, a great deal of money could have been saved, because even an untrained eye could see that a lot of people were not working.

I had been at that office for a separate reason some time before, and saw three different employees on personal calls just walking from one part of the open office to another. An alert manager would have seen this as well, and those three people could have been made redundant.

The point is, when a person is at work and feels easy enough to lounge back and have a friendly chat with their children, their spouse, their friends, going on for over one minute, their ‘working’ persona is non-existent.

Either they have no work and are marking time until quiting by personal calls, or work isn’t important to them.

In the case described of the ‘team’ which was able to locate and discharge those on the phone and thus properly downsize, the last redundancy was the manager, whose lack of management caused the problem.

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What do you think?

Written by jaylar

4 Comments

  1. I often hire people to work on the rental houses, I have had to tell them to get off the phone I did not pay them to talk on a phone. It eats up my time and they get paid for it, Nope not happening.

    • That is so typical. Years ago, when there was a land line, often the boss couldn’t get a dial tone because one of the workers was on the extension. This is easy to correct, simply pull the extension cord out of the jack.

      You have to be more alert today because people are contoled by the phones.

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