Le Blog’Ich

I just finished “Improve your profit and worker productivity at NO COST!”.

While I acknowledge that succeeding in limiting employee salaries is a very compelling promise, I wonder if there are no hidden costs, unbeknownst or not to the authors.

In particular, I challenge the value of the “We should be happy to have a job” mantra.

While used and abused across the pages of the book, it is not working for me as a management technique. Indeed, although it is true that it is very bad out there, I can’t help but thinking that (remaining) workers should actually be rewarded for those productivity increases; I find it doubtful that those (remaining) jobs are being spared out of Management’s mercy (see the infamous “1=2 or how an employee can do the work of two to save his job” chapter), since the trend has always be to eliminate redundancies, regardless of the social cost.

While the downturn is very much real and hence so is he need to be cautious with all expenses, I fear that this approach of using fear as a cost-cutting method, might backfire in the short, middle and long run.

In the short run, there is a chance that workers be burnt, and lose motivation, since -very much like the consumers mentioned in this blog – employees need hope to keep going.

In the middle-run, assuming that the downturn does end at some point, there is a chance that disgruntled employee will take the first opportunity to leave a company which -they will feel -had treated them poorly during tough economic times; which is not only sad but also a waste because if they were kept in the first place, chances are they were among the best of the company.

In the long run, especially if an increasing number of managers / business leaders keep on applying the techniques to their employees only (but not to themselves), I think that the workers’ trust in corporate values in general, will be shattered forever, leading to a generation of disenchanted employees, and a shift to a mercenary type of mindset for workers, ultimately harmful for corporations, although good for entrepreneurship.

I wish the authors had incorporated those elements in their thought-process.