Hey, Management Guy! My company has been doing big layoffs. This has been a huge trauma for everyone because the company is known for coddling and indulging its workforce, and layoffs were never, ever something you had to worry about. Well, now it’s time for the cuts to hit my staff, and frankly, I’m just not into having to be the bearer of bad news, especially since some of those getting let go are senior members of my staff. Can I avoid this bad scene altogether, perhaps by just conveniently going on vacation when the dirty deed is done?
If you get paid the big bucks to be a manager, you gotta be able to handle both good and bad. That means having the huevos grandes to let people on your staff go, if and when it ever comes to that.
“Vanity Fair … took some of the deepest staff cuts at Condé Nast, but Editor Graydon Carter didn’t deliver the bad news himself,” the Post reported. “Although Carter was said to have been at his restaurant, The Monkey Bar (Note from The Management Guy: How can some schlub editor afford to own a restaurant?), Wednesday night, he was a no-show in the office yesterday because he had jetted off on a vacation.”
The Post also added this little tidbit: “Vanity Fair’s layoffs were said to be in the double-digit range, and hit as high as senior editors and as low as fact checkers, and were deep, in part, because Carter largely ignored the edict to chop 5 percent late last year.”
So, Graydon Carter first ignores a corporate edict to cut costs, then runs out on vacation when his staff is getting whacked? Here’s a piece of advice for Condé Nast senior execs from The Management Guy: You would do well to let Mr. Carter permanently retire to managing his Monkey Bar when he returns from vacation, because he’s completely worthless as a manager, especially one you can count on when things get rough.
And that, Don, is what you should always remember: If you can’t handle the tough work of being a manager—like layoffs and staff cuts—you have no business being a manager at all. Yes, you may work in management or flatter yourself with a management title, but if you can’t look your co-workers in the eye and do the dirty deed when it needs to be done, you’re just a manager wanna-be. And in these tough economic times, those are the very first people who should be shown the door.
The fact is, my perspective is colored by the many different hats I wear in my daily life, including being the editor of a publication and Web site that focuses on how to better manage a workforce.
That’s also why I’m probably more attuned than most to drums I hear beating in the workforce jungle, and the message they seem to be signaling to me. And, here’s what I am hearing:
• The first message is that the long and unrelenting recession has pounded into workers a pervasive sense that their jobs, their livelihoods, and perhaps even their lives and well-being are at great risk every day. People everywhere are down, depressed, and many are close to giving up hope, if they haven’t reached that point already.
“Bob Watson feels lucky to have a job,” the story begins. “Lindy Cosme has a job, but not one she went to college for. Ronnie Woodfork has been looking for a job every day and still doesn’t have one. Three Hoosiers with different situations, and all three remain worried about the economy.”
The story says: “Faced with increasing job losses, worries about having enough money for retirement and continued difficulty in paying for basic items such as food, those ages 45 to 64 are one worried group,” according to a survey released this week by AARP. “… The survey, called ‘A Closer Look,’ was last done about eight months ago. The recession’s full effect is now being felt, new findings show.”
“A recent spate of suicides at France Télécom has revealed a paradox at the heart of French society: Even with robust labor protection, workers here see themselves as profoundly insecure, with many complaining about being pushed beyond their limits by the pace of economic change.” The newspaper adds, “What has caught the attention of the French media, public and government is that many of the suicides and more than a dozen failed attempts have been attributed to work-related problems by some experts and labor officials.”
It makes me wonder: If workers are so depressed and tormented that they are kicking up the suicide rate in highly unionized France, what does that mean for us across the pond in America, where we toil in a largely at-will, you-can-be-terminated-tomorrow work environment?
What is this going to take? As I said in my “Last Word” column, I think it’s simpler than most managers think: “More communication from the top would help. So would some sense of when the pay freezes and furloughs might end—even if that’s not right around the corner. And a greater recognition (and appreciation) of the sacrifices everyone is making would help build a sense that ‘We’re all going to get through this together.’ ”
That’s my formula for getting America’s workforce out of the funk it’s in. It’s not particularly complicated, but it begs the question: Where are the business leaders who have the courage to be trailblazers and take the first step? I pray it won’t take too long, because I’m still listening for those drums and that message.
“The Massachusetts economy is on the mend,” the Globe reports, “and the job market is showing signs of stabilizing. Temporary employment, considered a leading indicator for labor markets, has ticked up in each of the past four months. Key sectors of the state economy have posted job gains. Employers, who froze hiring in the darkest days of the recession earlier this year, are beginning to fill positions.”
And then there are these telling quotes that make you sit up and take notice.
“Six months ago, people were hunkered down. Nobody was sticking their head up,” said Dave Sanford, executive vice president at Winter Wyman Cos., a Waltham, Massachusetts-based staffing firm. “Now, they’re beginning to feel it’s OK to come out of the hole.”
“Some of our stronger sectors are showing signs of stabilizing,” said Elliot Winer, a regional economist based in Sudbury, Massachusetts. “The opportunities that are out there right now require education, training, and skills.”
Now, no one in the Globe story is saying that they see an imminent recovery anytime soon—not with Massachusetts posting an unemployment rate of 8.8 percent, a figure that is expected to rise in 2010 given how cautious employers remain.
In fact, Sanford says, “There’s no sense yet that the gates are open, the lights are on, and everybody goes back to work. But employers are cautiously optimistic that the economy is going forward. They’re just waiting for things to get a little brighter.”
Having employers feeling a little optimistic is critical if we’re going to start reversing the terrible economic trends we have been experiencing since this Big, Bad Recession started in December 2007. Massachusetts certainly isn’t a bellwether for the nation, but if you’re like me, you’ll take whatever good news wherever you can find it. And maybe, just maybe, this is the start of a small but growing trend that will help us not only start to see some recovery, but perhaps also allow employers to start thinking about investing in their workforces again.
I love holidays but always find that part of the price I pay for taking off is that a bunch of stuff has stacked up in the interim. So, here are a few interesting workforce odds and ends that you too might have missed while we were out celebrating Labor Day and the end of summer 2009:
The story discusses how Petco, the San Diego-based pet supply chain, adopted a three-page policy in November, modeled after what IBM is doing when it comes to employees and social media.
“Petco intranet manager Daniel Sundin said the policy bars blogging and using social media at the office unless required as part of an employee’s job,” the Union-Tribune story said. “The policy says employees are personally liable for what they write and are precluded, in part, from sharing sales numbers and proprietary information or using the company logo without permission.”
That sounds like a reasonable, level-headed workplace policy to me, but Petco’s intranet manager also made this point: “[A]lthough restrictions are needed … companies ignoring social media’s power miss the big picture. That’s just a head-in-the-sand thing,” Sundin added, “and you’re a dying company if you’re doing that.” Truer words have never been spoken.
And, here’s an observation from the Mercury News story that should frighten anyone who wonders what might happen if they get a pink slip.
“People don’t believe there’s a job out there for them anymore and they give up on themselves,” says Janice Shriver, a labor market consultant with the state’s Employment Development Department. “The long-term unemployed used to be people difficult to place because they were maybe ex-offenders, or homeless. Today it’s government workers and chemists and engineers.”
“As bad as the unemployment numbers are—10.7 percent in Florida—they don’t tell the whole story,” the Herald story says. “While hundreds of thousands of Floridians have lost their jobs because of the Great Recession, thousands more have taken big hits to their paychecks because of limited work hours or a shortage of jobs that use their skills. Economists call this underemployment, (and) the full extent of underemployment may be impossible to measure. But we do know this: In addition to the 9.7 percent of workers across the nation who were unemployed in August, another 5.8 percent were working part-time because they couldn’t find a full-time job. If those people were counted as unemployed, the jobless rate would be 15.5 percent.”
It was the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes who described the life of mankind when in his natural state as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” and it’s an apt description of the mood of many American workers as we approach Labor Day 2009.
Here’s some research that bears this out: It’s Adecco Group North America’s latest American Workplace Insights Survey that was conducted for Adecco by Harris Interactive. It shows that as Labor Day rolls around, a majority of workers are dissatisfied with their employers, particularly in these three areas—compensation, career growth and retention efforts.
The numbers break down like this:
• Two-thirds (66 percent) of American workers are not currently satisfied with their compensation.
• Additionally, 78 percent are not satisfied with their company’s overall retention efforts, while 76 percent are not satisfied about future career growth opportunities at their company.
• Working relationships are also strained, with almost half (48 percent) of workers saying that they are not satisfied with the relationship they have with their boss and 59 percent saying they are not satisfied with the level of support they receive from their colleagues.
• Workers are also critical of their organization’s brain trust, with 77 percent saying that they are not satisfied with the strategy and vision of their company and its leadership.
• In addition, some 68 percent of workers say they aren’t satisfied with their company’s contribution to their retirement plans.
“What workers are telling us,” says Bernadette Kenny, chief career officer at Adecco Group North America, “is that even during a recession, just having a job does not equate to job satisfaction. Employers need to be conscious of the concerns their staff is managing through on a daily basis and proactively come up with the appropriate solutions to improve retention and reduce the current and future high cost of turnover.”
I think Bernadette Kenny is on to something. Yes, everyone who has managed to avoid becoming another unemployment statistic should be happy that they’re still working, but that’s not exactly a rallying cry that’s going to get your workforce fired up and more engaged. Smart managers, as Kenny correctly points out, need to be actively plugged in to what their staffs are going through and looking for solutions to help them get through it.
The Adecco survey has a few suggestions for how managers can help to reward and retain workers even when dollars are tight, and for the most part, I think the suggestions are useful.
However, I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: Businesses everywhere need to actively engage and help workers get past the depression and bad feelings that so many have about their work and the organizations they work for. In other words, leaders need to step forward and help their workforce get their mojo back.
This latest research by Adecco is just another in a long line of surveys that show how workers are feeling. With a possible economic recovery on the horizon, it is clearly time for America’s business leaders to step up and start helping America’s workforce out of its economic funk.
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