Efficiency in the Work Place – How much is too much
I recently had a long conversation with a friend over the topic of efficiency. What is efficiency in the work place? To be brief, it is essentially finding better ways to do something that streamlines a process and saves the company money. Most companies want to have a way to save money, especially in this economy, but my biggest question is, do you really need to be that efficient if you don’t need to save money?
The only real way to get out of a recession is for the population to spend money. Go buy that TV, eat out at a restaurant, spend spend spend. That is the mantra that is always being shoved down our throats. Did you know grocery stores put milk in the far back of their buildings so customers have to walk past all the goodies to get to it? Why? So that we buy those goodies. Why is candy at check out isles? So we buy it when we are waiting to be checked out. What does that have to do with efficient companies? Simple, why should we in our every day lives not be efficient money saving people when that is what we are being preached to at corporations?
When a company needs to be efficient, that means they need to save money. In the conversation with my friend, he pointed out that ‘wouldn’t it be good if you could half your team, fire them, do their work and increase your salary by 1.5 percent?’? Initially, I see the brass ring,1.5 percent! Hell yeah, i’ll take that 1.5 percent. But, after some thinking, it hits me, wait a minute, the company just fired some poor guy with a family to feed, doubled my work and saved a nifty .5 percent of salary in the process. Did I just get pwn’d??
Another friend was agreeing with efficiency model. They pointed out how some workers would read magazines at work, or have a job whose sole purpose was to go between two people and relay information. They laughed. Then my second friend talked about how he worked 12 hours a day, drank irish mist at lunch, and was loaded with stress.
What occurred to me after was a bit eye opening. Why are we trying to save companies all that money? Aren’t their CEO’s getting massive bonuses, millions of dollars a year, while we struggle for a fraction of that? In fact, if you do fire two people in a four person team, you save, lets say, 200k a year for the company. Ok, so you increase the salary of the other two guys, which never happens after layoffs, and save a total of 100k a year. You’ve just increased the stress of everyone, no one likes layoffs, and increased the workload of the other two guys, for what? The 100k savings is either going to go into managing the debt of the poorly run company or it’s going to go into the pocket of the CEO or executive board members.
This is where my opinion skews from everyone else. Do we really need to be workaholic a-holes who spend 9-10-11-12 hours a day at work, work on vacations, work when we are sick, work work work, just so CEO’s get nice fat bonuses or we bail out the company that’s failing? I say, no. Instead of going for ‘efficiency’ why not go for ‘employee happiness’.
Lets say your company made one million dollars profit this year. You could, give it to executives as bonuses, save it, or hire 8-12 people to take stress off of everyone else. You know what happens when you have lower stress environment? People tend to be happier.
Now, I’m not going to go into the whole spiel about having 10 extra guys and not being able to manage them or get them to do work. And yes, over-population of your workforce is a concern, if you don’t need people, don’t hire them. If you have problems managing people, hire new managers. There could very well be a cultural problem and not an efficiency problem that you are plagued with.
Bottom line, being efficient is great. I do agree that streamlining a process in a work place only makes sense. But, what doesn’t make sense is firing people just to fire them because someone thinks there’s not enough work for them. The more people you have on the payroll, the better the economy will do in the long run. Sure you can get the job done with one person if they work just a little extra here and there, maybe the occasional weekend, but does that really get you anywhere? So what if two people really only have 5-6 hours of actual work a day anyway. That’s two families that have health insurance, two families that can eat tonight, two families that can have a warm house tonight and one CEO that doesn’t get his new leather couches. I’m really ok with that.
