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Four years ago we had six employees in the Office Operations Division at my company. Effective next month only two of us will be left. The workload has stayed the same but in July two people will be doing the work that six people used to do.
Yep... preaching to the choir there.
I work in telecom and am a part of a group that had maybe 30 technicians in the entire state. Then about five years ago they flushed all our admin assistants and we had to start doing our own clerical work...
Then soon after that they got rid of the purchasing departments and we had to start soliciting bids from contractors and doing our own PO's. And there's a lot of them.
Then two years ago they decided to "combine the jobs" and gave us all new Engineering job duties on top of our already heavy work load... We got a fancy new job title out of it though - "Assurance Engineer"
Then after that we had someone leave and they didn't back fill his position. I knew they wouldn't, but still.. So we split his workload up and I went from having ~32 sites that I was responsible for to 42.
But ok... whatever. It was rough, but somewhat manageable for a year or so...
THEN - just last year they offered a voluntary separation package to everybody.. And I'll admit, it was a sweet deal. Up to a year's severance pay with full benefits. I wanted to take it, but I wasn't quite 'there' yet, so I decided to hang on...
But as a result of that we lost eight people out of the original 30. So we split up all the sites again, and I now have 63. Double what I had a couple of years ago... Meanwhile the projects keep pouring in, more and more, day in, day out.. And the deadlines have not changed at all.
I used to be very proud of my work, and the company that I worked for. In fact just seeing our commercials on TV gave me a sense of pride... but no more. I used to look forward to retiring from here, but now I'm putting my resume together and am gonna dip a toe into the water to see what happens.
The sad thing about though it is I really like all the people I work with - and even have a boss that I like and respect. They are some of the smartest, and most dedicated people I've ever seen. But they're killing us, and I personally can't stand much more of it.
Last edited by Upstate67; 06-03-2019 at 06:36 AM..
Yes, my employer has successfully reduced workforce through a number of initiatives:
1. Early retirement packages
2. Offshore work to India
3. Removal of remote work so people have to quit
Yet the amount of work never changes.
Corporate America. Gotta love it.
And somebody "gotta love it" and is so happy and maybe laughing like an evil because his/her co-workers are out of job and having a hard time to find job somewhere else because most of the companies are doing the same now.
I work retail, and the company I work for was at one time a really good company to work for. They had people in various departments who knew what they were doing, mostly adults who got 40 hours per week, and who provided great customer service. We had a staff of about 25 people. Customers got great service.
Over the years, our company discovered the term "downsizing", and one by one, they kept eliminating positions and shifting the work to the people who remained. 1 person ended up doing the work of 4 people, and either did it, or they lost their job too.
Today, all the older people are gone, and the store is staffed primarily by high school kids, and managed by guys who are not much older. None of them know what the Hell they are doing, and customers have no one of experience there to guide them and help them make purchase decisions. The kids are happy to get whatever hours a week they can get, unlike seasoned , adult employees, who need to earn a decent living.
When I mentioned this to our district manager, he, of course, gave the corporate line that "We really do not need experienced people (aka as people who make more money than minimum wage) our inexperienced employees are capable of looking up answers on Google and helping the customers that way." He also feels we should not have to provide information on how to use our products as it is the customer's responsibility to do their own research and know what they want when they come in.
So now, what customers get when they walk in is one kid on the register, a manager who is not much older, and maybe one other kid who is working on the floor. And companies wonder why more and more people don't go to brick and mortar stores any more, and simply order off the internet.
Originally Posted by tnff
The unfortunate part is no one in our management chain above me has actually done any of the work we do, so they have completely unrealistic ideas of how much labor and how long it takes to do certain things. And at the same time they are adding more and more managerial BS approvals and paperwork that just slow things down while giving them the illusion of being in charge.
Quote:
Originally Posted by RogueMom
This is true at so many places of business these days.
Quote:
Originally Posted by RogueMom
I've been working for over 4 decades, and under staffing is the biggest change I've seen over the last two. Meanwhile, there are often too many "Chiefs" trying to micro-manage the too-few "Indians", continually rolling out new initiatives and procedures down the pipeline, often without much real merit, in order to justify their jobs.
I'm planning to just stay at my current company no matter how bad it gets on into retirement. It's better than the last one I worked for, and I realize that, the grass is probably not going to be greener somewhere else.
Yes, and the "Chiefs" always have meetings after meetings to think how to increase more and more and more work for employees (no amount is enough for them), to create forms and forms to add paperwork on the staff's daily real technical work to sign and/or to request clients to sign to cover their butts. They have to think of making lots of changes constantly because if they don’t create changes, they will have nothing to do, and they will be out of work.
As a business owner, when I hear things like "there was a reduction from 6 to 2 with the workload staying the same", I'm always curious if technological improvements mean the 2 can do the work of 6 without any additional work on those remaining.
In the case of our company, there have been no improvements. We went through a re-org 18 months ago. Where we had 20 account managers, they divided them up into two teams doing different jobs.
Then they decided to slim down departments and lay-off three more account managers. People that were supposed to have 20 accounts now have 60. People that were supposed to have 100 accounts now have 200.
We get complaints from clients daily, cancellations due to lack of service. I have escalated these over and over again to leadership and they turn a deaf ear.
We can't get contracts back to bring in revenue. Heck, we can't even get pricing for a product because they have make our support team so lean.
It's astonishing when I present leadership with a spreadsheet showing we have lost a half million in sales because we are too lean. It's just going to get worse as time goes on.
Last edited by veuvegirl; 06-03-2019 at 08:27 AM..
Yes. There has been a mandatory hiring freeze for the past couple of years, so as people retire, they aren't being replaced. There is an entire row of empty cubicles now.
I've been working for over 4 decades, and under staffing is the biggest change I've seen over the last two. Meanwhile, there are often too many "Chiefs" trying to micro-manage the too-few "Indians", continually rolling out new initiatives and procedures down the pipeline, often without much real merit, in order to justify their jobs.
I'm planning to just stay at my current company no matter how bad it gets on into retirement. It's better than the last one I worked for, and I realize that, the grass is probably not going to be greener somewhere else.
I left a job one time, on ok terms but nothing special. I thought the management was bad, so I went to a new company. The guy that hired me made promises, and I thought they were going in the direction everybody else in the industry was going. Wrong. The guy that hired me turned out to be notorious for failing to live up to his hiring promises, and the company went in a different direction than I thought it would. My co-workers were terrible too. After 6 months I was sniffing around my old company wanting to go back! I quit the bad job, and wound up freelancing and doing other work for about a year and a half. I learned my lesson that the grass is NOT always greener. Sometimes you have to be happy where you are.
Yes, my employer has successfully reduced workforce through a number of initiatives:
1. Early retirement packages
2. Offshore work to India
3. Removal of remote work so people have to quit
Yet the amount of work never changes.
Corporate America. Gotta love it.
Yes, the last IT company that I worked for also did this in replacing virtually all of its highly paid workforce with cheap newbies with no experience. ERPs, layoffs, offshore, no more remote workers, been there, done that. I guess it is the "in thing" to do nowadays. As to the long term survival of the company, well, umm... that's another matter.
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He also feels we should not have to provide information on how to use our products as it is the customer's responsibility to do their own research and know what they want when they come in. 
Correct
