Barrier:
Less Work means Jobless !

By Anusha John

August 13, 2010 at 6:45am

Moonshots

Encourage the dissenters

Summary

Many employees are afraid to admit that they do not have enough work because they fear that they might be laid off if word gets out. Quite a few teams have mastered the art of manipulating their productivity metrics. This leads to a wastage of the organization's resources and since employees are, more often than not, pretending to be busy, their skills and abilities are underutilized.

Description

When top management are downsizing or right sizing their organization, they tend to look at the productivity of different business units, teams and individuals. The least productive entities usually get the axe.

In order to ensure that they are not under the microscope, most individuals/teams try their very best to show a high productivity in their weekly or monthly reports. In periods when there is not enough work, they resort to "cooking the books" to maintain the record of being highly productive. When times are good the organisation does not feel the impact of such practices. However this is not sustainable in the long term. Costs go up. Revenues reduce. No one knows why!

Employees are so worried about losing their jobs or getting a bad appraisal that they spend most of their time and energy pretending to be busy. What happens in the process is that they are being paid for work that they are not doing and their skills and abilities are not being utilised to its fullest potential. People fail to understand that their success depend on the success of the organisation and that by cheating the organisation they are, in the process, cheating themselves.

Illustration

When I was working, my team was over staffed so all of us did not have enough work to keep us occupied for 5 hours, let alone 8 hours. During breaks, when some of the managers asked me how work was, I told them I didn't have much of it. As soon as I returned to my cubicle my team mates came over and cautioned me saying that I should never tell a manager that I didn't have enough work as it will give a bad impression about the team. Of course I never mentioned this again.

Within 2 months there was a requirement in another team and the senior manager remembered me mentioning that I didn't have enough work in my team and reassigned to the new team where I had ample work and lots of new opportunities.

Honesty turned out to be the best policy for me after all.

Root Causes

The main cause for such behavior from teams and individuals is the notion that the basis for appraisal is the amount of work one has.

Solution

If the employee is honest about his/her work condition and informed management of the same it would be more beneficial for him as well as the organisation.
1. There are teams where there is too much work and not enough people, rather than recruiting a new person for this work, the employee with low work load can be assigned to work there.
2. Management always has problems which are not big enough for it to spend time looking into. The employee can be given the task of coming up with an optimal solution for one of these problems. This encourages the employee to be innovative and if he/she comes up with a workable solution everyone stands to gain.
3. The employee can be trained on some new technology or process making him more versatile and thus more useful to the organisation because of economies of scope.

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