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The company my best friend works for has brought on board some folks they're calling "efficiency consultants" to assess ways to "enhance efficiency" at the company. When first told about this, I immediately thought about the movie "Office Space," but my friend said it was supposed to just be about staying competitive in the marketplace. To that end, employees were encouraged to submit ideas about how things could be done faster, better, more straightforward in terms of different processes and departments.
Well, now they've been asked to fill out a form about what they do and what percentage of time they spend doing it. This has not been done companywide, but instead appears to be happening selectively, based on unknown factors. Also, rumors are now swirling that layoffs are eminent and will be "bad."
I've heard of this happening before, but never have been touched by it - directly or indirectly - before.
Have you experienced having such consultants come to your company? What happened? I want to be a voice of calm to my friend, as he has a mortgage and a family to support. But in the back of my mind, I'm thinking this doesn't sound good at all.
Hate to break this news to you and your friend, but he should be a little worried. I used to work for a company that had a team of "efficiency experts." I was on this team and our projects were mandated by senior management and we were pretty much sent to a particular business/department to do a complete review and analysis of the operations and day to day tasks. We took into consideration the volume of work, number of FTE (Full Time Equivelent), and amount of time it took to process a particular item. For example, if you processed mortgage applications - if you get 5 applications a day to process, and it takes you 10 minutes to process each one, that equates to 50 minutes of your day - so what are you doing for the remaining 7hrs and 10 minutes? We would calculate every piece of work in the group, and also look at "how" it's done. In other words, if your doing something manually - how do we automate it to make it more "efficient?"
At the end of our analysis, we provided a huge (usually around 200+ page) report to management of our findings and recommendations on how to improve the operations overall. But generally, they ended with something in the lines of....you currently have 10FTEs in your group, but you only have enough work for 8 FTEs, and if you implement the following recommendations, you can save another FTE. This will generally lead to managers laying off about 1 or 2 people to accomodate the savings.
Although there are no guaranteeds as each department and the work is different in each case, but with these "experts", it usually is all about expense management and cost cutting.
I figured as much. My friend is now getting worried. Initially, the employees were told that this was in no way a job reduction program; that this was a way for them to identify the best ways to do the work they know and complete each day. The more he's shared with me, the more concerned I get; his wife is expecting and does not work. How common is this practice? I got laid off once - a long time ago - well, actually the company was sold, but there were no sights or signals of consultants being brought in to lead the change.
I wonder if this is something that will increase in popularity as the economy keeps sinking ...? This is really scary - to be lied to by management and sold a bag of goods. I will have to pray for my friend; they already froze salaries at his job this year, and was already bummed out over that!
I have worked at 2 different companies that brought in teams like what you describe. In both instances the team was with us for 2 solid weeks, delivered a massive report to the CEO, and while one company made big noise about making changes they never did a single thing any differently. The other company took a few of the suggestions and implemented them, but they were more about how the workload was distributed.
People panicked about their jobs for a good 8-10 weeks. Nobody got let go, nobody had their hours cut. Both times the company paid HUGE money to the "experts" and did not really net any savings.
I worked with many of these kinds of teams over the years. By efficiency, they mean "doing more with less" which is another way to say "fewer workers".
Good management should be able to do this kind of work without bringing in consultants. My view of consultants is a simple one - they are people to whom you give your watch, and they tell you the time!
I've worked at two companies that did this. In one case there were MASSIVE layoffs after the report was submitted. In the other there were sporadic layoffs, but only in departments that everyone knew were already way overboated to begin with.
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