Posted on 08/03/2023 10:38:50 AM PDT by ShadowAce
Bulk attrition is like playing with nitro—not recommended.
The reason is that it is easier for the good employees to find jobs than the not-so-good employees.
The overall talent level drop can prove very damaging and in some cases fatal.
It is particularly dangerous in this modern age of specialization and computerization.
Losing a few key “experts” can cripple an organization—management may not even know how important some of these folks are—until they are gone.
I have told this story before.
I know one woman who retired a few years ago. She supervised a small staff (five folks or so) that did very obscure book-keeping work for a large organization.
Their computer system was installed in the 1960s and had never been updated—they were way below the radar, never had issues, so management didn’t bother to upgrade their system.
What management did not know is that this woman made manual adjustments before bills were sent to customers—maybe ten or so every day so a couple of hundred of adjustments a month. She had her own Excel spreadsheet that figured out the correct answer. This was necessary because the 1960s program had some bugs in it—and was never updated since the programmers had long since retired.
You may ask why she did not tell her bosses about this.
The answer was—she did—for many bosses, many different years, and they all told her the same thing.
“You are doing a great job fixing these issues manually. My boss does not want to hear about problems that we have already solved.”
Finally she gave up arguing with her bosses (who kept turning over—I think she went through seven of eight of them over thirty five years).
Her small staff turned over a lot as well—partially because they were overworked and underappreciated by senior management. This is what happens when you do your job so well that there are never problems—for decades.
Her staff did not want to learn about all the problems she fixed—they had enough to deal with....
Then she retired.
It took six months before the excrement met the rotating blades.
It cost the company millions of dollars and major reputational harm to fix the mess.
Senior management never knew what hit them.
Then your metrics become a boat anchor around your neck. You can be right and ethical, but that may not be how the junior vice presidents club measures you?! They risk assess you. If you can be a risk to them, you're gone. If you're agreeable and do as told, they value you. Results are not important.
Which also explains so many failed companies and so many regime changes at a company.
Yep.
re white collar work there are a few things that work better in person, and those things will vary by job, sector, even individual businesses and should be hand-tuned.
For nearly everything else, the office, the cubicle, and all that came with it were (are) overhead to both the company and especially to the employees in terms of both plain cash and time.
Correlating: imagine these WEF stooges actually trying to get all of everyone crammed into “15 minute cities.”
Quitting your job means that you need to find a new one.
Ideally, that job should be better than the one you left.
If large numbers of people quit their established job because they don't want tot go to work, are they deluded enough to think they are going to get a remote, no show job at a company hiring because they are trying to fill onsite job positions that opened up because their entitled workers quit because they refused to to return to work.
Not gonna happen
.
What will happen is a lot of arrogant, entitled people are going to quit their jobs and be looking for no show jobs all at the same time that employers are interviewing for onsite jobs.
People who quit their jobs are not eligible for unemployment insurance payments.
This could get interesting
Doughnuts bait them out to a meeting room in the mornings sometimes. My wife then closes the door while they are in there so they can't escape to a zoom appearance.
Ask Elon Musk. Besides it's just human nature. Much easier to goof off at home when your boss is not watching. But I'm glad your WFH arrangment is working. I'm not saying that it's all bad.
In the real world what will happen is that the disgruntled employees will not immediately quit.
They will show up to the office.
Of course they will call out sick a lot while they are working on their resume.
It will take a few months and then the best employees will start disappearing one by one by one.
In six months almost all the key talent will be gone.
What will be left are the dregs.
When senior management figures out what happened they will of course start blaming middle management—and fire a bunch of them!
My wife’s team increased their productivity significantly during their time working remote.
She tells me it’s because they would spend about an hour a day just shooting the breeze in the office before starting to get stuff done. And every meeting in person was a massive time sink—more easily handled by zoom.
Their boss got them all converted to remote.
Now she can walk the dog at lunch.
Back to where? There is no "back to the office" for those we've hired multiple states away. There is no "back to the office" when the company didn't renew the leases.
As for money, it's the company that can ill afford the cost of leasing expensive offices full of lesser capable staff.
Office real estate landlords are loathe to lower the rents. They'll gladly offer you more space for the same money but that doesn't help a firm's bottom line. We had one landlord offering twice the space at the same price but our company still refused to renew the lease because the additional space was irrelevant.
Even before 2020, I would stop in at one office where a full half of one floor was an "exploded" layout where everything was like twice the distance from what it should have been. It looked like a showroom for an office furniture maker. One thing that stood out was that cubicle neighbors couldn't share a waste basket because the desks were too far apart. Yet, there were a couple of neighbors who ended up sharing a waste basket halfway between two desks that were about 12 feet apart. It looked so odd to see a random trash can in the open.
On other floors, they learned their lesson and put up full-height partitions. When I walked around I realized there was a giant empty center to the cubicle farm.
The Scamdemic just made it a whole lot easier to end the leases.
“What will happen is a lot of arrogant, entitled people are going to quit their jobs and be looking for no show jobs all at the same time that employers are interviewing for onsite jobs.”
Except that for the most part (by far), that’s not what’s happening. Quality employees who want to work remotely quit because they’ve already secured an equivalent (or better) job that allows them to work remotely.
Ya think
The deadbeats had to work again and did NOT like it. Good riddance!
There are key employees that need to be retained , there are good employees that are worth keeping and there are dead wood employees that are best replaced.
The trick is to identify the key people and do what it takes to retain them at any cost.
Then do your best to keep the good people worth keeping
Then use this situation as an opportunity to get rid of the dead wood employees by allowing them to quit on their own initiative
Then have a proactive recruiting program in place to identify high quality workers, many of whom are on the job market because they quit their jobs and who now need to pay bills and are getting a reality check to replace the dead wood and the good employees who left the company.
There is a decent chance there may be a window of opportunity for an employers market to recruit good people at a reasonable pay scale in an orderly fashion if one is properly prepared.
That sounds like a management failure.
“In six months almost all the key talent will be gone. What will be left are the dregs.”
But hey - the dregs will be in the office, so the Luddite managers can walk around and “manage” them. :)
Correct. And no one should give a crap about an employer's wants. Nobody will work for you? Tough crap.
“The most idiotic story I hear regularly these days is from people who have been forced to go back to the office at least three days a week ... and then spend most of their time in the office on web meetings anyway.”
Yeah. That was my experience as well. It depends on the size and type of Company and your organization.
If all the people in your office are interacting and physically collaborating then there is nothing better than face to face. I’m all in on the benefits of those people working in the office.
However if all of the people are on zoom calls with people in other cities then being in the office matters not.
N=1 is meaningless and you know it. Most of the Twitter employees did nothing at home or in the office.
Tools for tracking productivity are good now.(Likely positionally dependent)
Certain jobs might be better off in office.
I purposely came my direction because it’s mainly white males, and give me my work and leave me alone.
The only "losers" are merchants in downtown Albany and elsewhere. You couldn't get be to downtown Albany for anything. In fact, many argued in 1990 that putting the now MVP Arena downtown was shortsighted. It should have been built on available acreage in SAFE Latham and thus attract visitors from Albany/Schenectady/Troy. I have many friends that wouldn't go to Albany for an event at night on a bet.
Pretty funny and scary really. Multiple giant boilers, rail service with caustic and acid deliveries, high speed steam pressured surface contact dryers weighing 80,000 pounds spinning at 2,200 RPM. Transformer yards @26,000 Volts, operating voltages of 4160 volts, chlorine gas, wastewater treatment facilities, and one security guard in the building.
Not one engineer or manager there 2/3 of the time in operation. About 75 show up Monday thru Friday 8 to 3 and hold a lot of meetings with each other.
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