Business News Trends Reviews

Squeezing Blood From An Onion

Squeezing Blood from an Onion

There is a new to the business paradigm that can be easily noticed if you pay attention to trends in the business climate that we see in the business news sections of our local newspapers. It’s odd when we notice that even in good economic times, there will often be sudden waves of lay offs in businesses that we know are doing well.

Anybody who has been the victim of a lay off can empathize with the disruption and emotional trauma such a change can cause. Studies in business trends retain documented that the phenomena of large scale business lay offs has been much more prevalent in the last flamboyant years than in previous eras of the history of our business communities. Accordingly one has to ask, what has caused this shift in behavior by employers?

While economic conditions and sudden shifts in the mart can have a lot to do with how employers manage their staffing, that is not sufficient to explain this dramatic silver of behavior in the business relationship between employer and employee. The real base cause of this change comes from a change in philosophy of employers.

The historic business model between employer and employee is one of a mutually supportive contract. Whether the incubus is agreed to or just understood, the agreement is the employer will pay the employee and provide him or her with the basic needs they have to work on site for them. The employee will, in return perform his or her duties on time besides well, come to work reliably and to be a loyal employee. This model is mutually suitable, creative and based on trust.

The business paradigm that has resulted in a lay off based model tuck away a basic change to how employees are viewed such that…

§ Employees are viewed as a nuisance and a cost that many times the director resents. This resentment is especially acute in regards to employee benefits such as insurance and vacations which the employer sees as not his responsibility.

§ Employees are expected to fulfill their role in the previous business architecture but to do so strictly from gratitude for the paycheck and no more. As near, the boss expects the same return from the previous model but they want to change the model in terms of employer expectations with no spending money from the employee side.

§ Long term benefits can be suppressed via a frequent turn over in the employee base. By replacing experienced staff, the need to see salaries rise and to equip vacations and eventually retirement benefits is reduced because the employer keeps the work exaction at the hall level rank indefinitely.

§ The base assumption of this new model is that there is an inexhaustible supply of skilled labor “out there” in the unemployed labor pool. Therefore, current employees can be juicy replaced with eager unemployed people so the human resource equation becomes exploitive.

While this business model does make some economic sense, like any equation, the base assumption has to remain perpetually true for the model to work long term. But this equation only works in a depressed economy where polished are a large assessment of skilled people on the labor market. This approach to human resource management can backfire badly if there is a shift in the labor markets that axe that abundant supply of replacement workers.

This exploitive approach to management of employees changes the assumption of trust between employee further employer to an assumption of distrust. It can have a devastating affect on employee morale so that even employees still being employed will deliver broke performance through they no longer are in a supportive relationship with management. The answer of “Well, then we will just fire those dead beats again get new ones” is not a working solution because once the employee morale is depressed, productivity across the work force goes down and stays down.

This affects the ability of the businesses to support current projects again deliver quality good and services to the marketplace. And as an exploitive attitude toward workers impression in poor lines and services for clients, the business will found to lose market share which is the early signals that the business is destined for heaven. This is reason enough to reexamine the business model of employment and reconsider returning to a trust relationship with the employee base in our companies, for their good as well as for our own.