December 31 was the end of the financial year for a lot of major companies and many take the opportunity to reorganise.
In times like these, when money is tight and budgets are being cut, this usually means a downsizing of staff.
If you are like me and run a small company the way to reduce the headcount is by getting rid of your less productive employees first.
The people who work hard and add value to your business are the ones you want to keep.
However, this is not the case with large multinational companies.
They may have operations around the world, but will have their corporate headquarters and human resources (HR) departments centralised in the US, the UK, Europe or Japan – so they have no local feeling for which employees are great and which are not.
Generally they just decide to cut positions, so jobs that are maybe not quite so sales or manufacturing focused are eliminated and their duties shared among remaining staff.
This means you frequently end up with Mohammed, who is the hardest working and most loyal employee you have, being made redundant while Ali, who is a waste of space, is kept on and expected to assume some of Mohammed’s duties.
It does not take a rocket scientist to see that this will reduce the company’s productivity.
The other unforeseen consequence of this are that remaining staff who have all worked well with Mohammed and thought of him as a great guy become demoralised, as they realise the company does not recognise hard work or loyalty.
Loyalty is a thing that has totally disappeared from the workforce over the last decade.
There was a time when you joined a company and worked for it for life.
You started low, got your head down making your appraisals, hitting your targets and over time you gradually rose up the corporate ladder to the point that by the time your kids finished school and the mortgage was paid you were earning a good salary and able to save for a comfortable and well-earned retirement.
Not so nowadays.
Brash new chief executive officers are hired and their only concern is to maximise returns for the shareholders.
As a result everybody except them is fair game for the chop.
Permanent employees have been replaced by contractors, zero-hours contracts or had their positions outsourced.
The company no longer has commitment to holiday pay, sick pay or pensions.
Workers now have to jump around between companies frequently as self-employed, which means you’re not getting paid to take holidays and you drag yourself into work with a cold and give it to everybody else.
Eventually all this takes its toll and the company fails, unless it reaches a point in the cycle before it’s too late and gets rid of the HR department.
The workplace is a pretty tough place to be nowadays, but don’t worry because the government will raise the retirement age – so you don’t have to save for quite so long between retiring from work and retiring from life.