Cutting Work, Not People – A Great Leadership Opportunity For HR
by Alan Collins
Most companies have responded to the recession by eliminating people. Hundreds of thousands of people. And, though it’s very sad for the employees involved, there are sound business and P&L reasons for companies to do this.
However, one thing this doesn’t do is make these organizations more efficient….or even necessarily more competitive. In fact, once the bodies are gone, that’s when the problems really begin. For example, you are now left with 30 people doing the work that 100 used to do. Leaving these remaining 30 people overworked, frustrated, angry and now looking for jobs themselves. And much of this new work on their plate goes undone. Or done poorly because they are less experienced at doing it or are too busy to fit them into their expanded to do lists.
For these reasons, I strongly believe that work should be cut first, before cutting people. By eliminating the work first, you can then “rightsize” the number of people needed to do the remaining work. However, very few organizations do this.
But, here’s the deal.
Whether you cut work first or second, there is a great opportunity for you as a savvy HR professional to step in, take a leadership role, impact the business and add to your resume and personal marketability by leading this “work out” process.
What this involves is:
-Selling the business case and the need to do this to the leadership team.
-Organizing sessions to bring together the people from the organization who know the work best.
-Facilitating meetings to help them to identify creative solutions to eliminate work.
-Documenting commitments the made to take work out.
-Setting up follow up systems or meetings to hold people accountable.
Here are just a few of the many opportunity areas that you can help your clients identify:
1. Where can we eliminate low priority work.
An example: In an HR department “work out” session, an HR generalist I know was making frequent trips to the smallest location of a tiny division to develop the leadership team. She was doing a great job while learning a great deal about developing teams. Her time and attention was much appreciated by the manager of the small team. But in the “work out” meeting, people mentioned that she was misusing a valuable HR resource — herself — on a low-priority project. She eliminated these trips and focused on higher priority businesses and clients.
2. Where can we streamline or eliminate meetings, reports, measurements and approvals.
Examples: Reduce update meetings that consume time and ask people to update by email instead; Eliminate or streamline analytical reports that nobody reads: Cut back on the number of people that need to approve office supplies, travel arrangements, software upgrades.
3. Who can we subcontract out work to in order to free up people.
With so many people out of work, there are lots of professionals who are taking on temporary assignments at an affordable cost. Also, many companies are offshoring their routine, day to day work overseas at cheap prices. You might find that you can utilize existing people more efficiently or free them up to do higher priority work, by taking routine work off their shoulders.
4. Right-sizing spans of control.
There are no magic numbers about what the span of control should be, but there are some pretty good “should nots.” Managers shouldn’t have just 1 or 2 people reporting to them, and there should not be 30 people reporting to one manager. Often, to reward our people we’ve created quasi-management positions so that we can promote capable people give them more money, keep them, and allow to keep doing what they were doing before we promoted the. We give people 1 or 2 people as assistants who really don’t require much direction. But this allows us to call the person a manager and fool the evaluation system. Rightsizing spans of control can even out the workload.
Again, these are just a few of the many “work out” opportunities you can help your organization identify as the HR professional leading this effort.
The great thing about this is that it can produce measurable results for your organization. You can dollarize and quantify the number of hours saved. For example, eliminating work that takes 400 hours a year is equivalent to freeing up one person for 10 weeks to work on higher priority work or $12,000 (at $30 an hour). For companies who have done this after layoffs, it is not uncommon for these efforts to yield hundreds of thousands of hours in freed up time for overworked people and millions of dollars in cost savings.
Having said all this, this is not easy to do. Many managers are reluctant to give up their work, they believe it’s their job security. Others have an “everything is a priority” approach to their business and can’t see any possible way they can do their jobs differently. So you’ll need to know how to work through this resistance. You may want to partner with a well-respected business leader on this effort to help with the blocking and tackling.
If you’re interested in taking on this HR leadership role in your organization, a great book for you to get is called GE Workout (pictured). General Electric has done this for years and GE Workout walks you step by step, through how you can position workout sessions in your organization, how to handle pitfalls and resistance by managers to this effort as well as how you can plan, implement, and successfully conduct these types “work out” sessions. You can get GE Workout by going HERE.
Taking out work, not people, is a great opportunity for the savvy HR professional to impact the business, demonstrate measureable results, add to their resume and position themselves for success in their organization.
Alan Collins is CEO & Chief Editor, SuccessInHR.com. He was formerly Vice President – Human Resources at Pepsi where he led HR initiatives for their Quaker Oats, Gatorade and Tropicana businesses. His new book, The Unwritten HR Rules, will be published in June.
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Agree with all of the above. Have to say that far few people seem to realise that its NOT about everyone working harder. Working smarter & using technology is the answer. If everyone works harder and the systems are bad – all that happens is the customer/end user just gets bad service quicker.
I think your first point “low value work” is valid BUT also think that responsibility must also be pushed back to the end user.
Unfortunately, some managers have become managers because they have been there the longest and/or know how to cash up and management skill is confused with technical expertise.
Jonathan,
Would agree 100%. End users must take accountability too. Thanks for your feedback.
Best,
Alan