Recession – Is it an opportunity or Misfortune...

Just on the continuation of the first posting “recession”, I believe all the readers here would be aware by now that I am trying to put a positive aspect on recession. The Q3 and Q4 -2008 and mostly the Q1 – 2009 were engulfed with the slow growth, it all started during Q3 – 2008 that we actually started talking about it and news channel slowly started their focus on it. In Q1 – 2009 it was real worse when companies started filtering there man power and cost cutting reason given performance not being up to the mark. But few were true to their reason and few were not, the personal grudges too fell on employees were the employee had less say then the management. The first month of Jan – 09 was the time when maximum people were laid off, figure stands at 151,352 in US alone, and figure in India stands at 102,345 so the overall impact was worse than thought and the episode of satyam was just like icing on the cake.

The industry were facing the heat, heat to maintain the utilization report, increasing the working hours, removing the toilet paper from toilets – part of cost cutting, free lunches were off, onsite travelling came to stand still, hiring were frozen, and the worst hit department was the HR as they were the one who have to inform employees about their dehire / layoff. There is no better way to tell any of the associate not to report to office from tomorrow but that the role HR have to perform in the organization.

This was time for the best people to come out with flying colours because the big fat companies were not set to wind up. Example: vodaphone ads.... they made 3o ads from 3 Crores were as earlier they use to spend 30 Crores for 5 ads. Are you feeling the difference? The companies were looking for the smart people to work for then find out innovative idea to attract the clients and retain them as well. The supply chain management has to be tightened, the duration of the project had to reduce and no of employee on the project has to be reduced on client request, in short the associate were asked to give an out put of 200 % in downfall which few took as a challenge and are still striving for the same and few got to the fatigue level.

I felt this was a time when the best were surviving (talking about co who has laid off people purely based on performance). To give a proper example will take you to Mumbai local trains. In the platform so crowed that people get into the train with very hardship and few just get carried away and they won’t be sure where they heading to; now comparing the same to a station in Switzerland where there is no rush just step in and step out. (Correlation here was people to employee trains in Mumbai as employers during good time and trains in Switzerland as employers during bad times). You would be wondering what trains doing here just wanted to give a pictorial representation about the functionality of the organization during good time and bad time. Its different!!!

So if any organizations have proper strategy in place i bet, it can be the best employer for the centuries! So one should have a bench player but need to train them in proper manner more on strategic manner, having a good team in the project and best team bench is always recommended. Organization should have very healthy competition on the floor.

On a contrast I had a very different prospect on the same, prospect of not being alert and proper knowledge of one own business. And now when things are getting stabilized again we would go back to the normal stance as we were earlier – we are humans after all. But the smart people won’t do it instead they would still keep a check and try doing things that can help counter situation in similar events. If anyone associated with any organization could answer this few question they would mostly won’t get into lay off sinario

· Why during good time we don’t keep an eye on our bench recourses?
· Why when there is new technology introduces, we start searching new resume in the market, why don’t we utilize our own resources through training?
· Why is it so that we don’t have a proper compensation plan like if the market is bad the associate get part of their salary if not full?
· Why employees are not seen as assets in company?
· Why bad performers are not removed during good time, they are always liability even if company makes 110% profit?
· Why we don’t work on contingency plans?

So if we look in macro and micro level the condition could have been easily encountered, but it was so sudden that we never got the time to react, and by the time we reacted recession was all over us.

Would like to hear from readers??

Wait for the next blog... more of “HR - to do during recession”???