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A good friend told me, “I was terminated with 20 minutes left in the day, on a Thursday. They had said I would be severed sometime during the month but they had led me to believe it would be closer to the end of the month. Nice treatment after 24 1/2 years …”

Another company bought his employer a few years before. He had known the day was coming, and he never once expressed resentment over his coming layoff. Elimination of redundant staff is one of the realities of a merger or acquisition. Yes, it’s painful, but there’s no foul — business is out to make good business decisions.

Why was it was managed so badly?

Consider the Portuguese man-of-war. As we learned in high school, although it looks like one animal, it’s actually a colony of independent coelenterates, each of which feeds and reproduces separately.

We’re colonies, too. As Richard Dawkins points out in The Selfish Gene, a body is just a gene’s way of making more genes. Even that is a simplification. An unknown proportion of our internal constituents began as independent critters. Mitochondria, for example, the organelles that make oxygen the key to metabolism instead of a toxic gas, started out as free-living bacteria.

Even though each of us is a colony, we manage to act as a purposeful organism – so much so that we harm individual colony members with callous disregard. (Example: Every time someone goes on a diet they starve or kill billions of fat cells – and just think of how many are destroyed during liposuction!)

Liposuction creates personal change. How about business change?

IS projects have always been about business change, and an increasing number of companies recognize that all IS projects are really business change projects that inject significant new technology into the equation.

Most business changes both create and eliminate jobs within the enterprise. Whatever your role in IS, at some point in your career you’ll help eliminate the jobs of innocent employees who did their jobs competently but whose roles are no longer needed because of the business change you helped the company achieve.

Companies are getting better at managing business change. They’ve learned to redesign processes, integrating technology into the new process design. They’ve learned to train employees in the new processes and technology rather than assuming everything will be self-evident. Most have learned to communicate the reason for a change, not just “here’s your new job – now go do it.” Some have even learned that redesigning the organizational chart comes after redesigning processes and technology, not before.

Sadly, though, many companies still see employees as nothing more than adipose cells … hence the phrase, “Getting rid of the fat.” And if you raise your hand to protest a layoff you risk being branded as soft – the business equivalent of “bleeding heart liberal.”

So here’s some advice: If you have an opportunity to influence how your business will manage a change that requires layoffs, don’t get all righteous about what is ethical, compassionate, or the right thing to do. In business, ethics is a personal matter, and ethical businesses get that way through leaders who act ethically, not through preaching.

Instead, be practical.

Point out that the long-term goal of business change is growth, and the cost of laying off one group of employees and then recruiting a different group is far higher than the cost of retraining the employees you have.

Suggest that when “trimming the fat” the company should use a sharp knife, not a sledgehammer. If valuable employees who support change find opportunities while non-performers and change resistors find themselves on the outside, most employees will quietly applaud when they no longer have to cover for their non-producing peers.

Most important of all, point out that every time the company treats departing employees like the cast-off byproducts of cosmetic surgery, the morale of every remaining employee plummets, and employees who might otherwise support change will become sullen and passive resistors of it, something every bit as poisonous as some colonists in a Portuguese man-of-war.

That’s bad for profits, and even worse when the next big change comes around.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

When it comes to government intervention in the antitrust action against Microsoft, lots of people say the marketplace should decide, even when there’s no longer a competitive marketplace and the whole point of the antitrust laws is to either preserve competition or compensate for its absence.

In the labor market, though, there’s widespread desire for government intervention to keep out “cheap foreign labor” – protectionism, in a word, to prevent competition.

Technical professionals are in short supply. Still, some Americans can’t find work, or at least can’t find it at their desired salary in their city of residence. Then they read about an influx of inexpensive foreign technical talent, especially from Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Adding two and three to get 23, they conclude that greedy American employers are hiring cheap foreign labor at their expense.

Like it or not, American technical talent, like all American labor, competes in a global labor market. When the government takes protectionist action we compete through our employers. When it doesn’t, we compete as individuals.

Take your pick, but when, for example, SAP wins a contract over Oracle in the ERP market, foreign jobs increase and American jobs decrease just as surely as when an American company hires a Pakistani programmer. One way or another, we all compete globally for our jobs.

Many American technical professionals have contributed to the developing mess through complacency, assuming job security from, for example, designing and programming batch Cobol systems. American employers certainly aren’t blameless in this fiasco either. You probably have employees like this batch Cobol programmer. When was the last time you provided career counseling or growth opportunities? Do your codger-programmers even know their jobs are at ever-increasing risk?

If you’re recruiting you probably have the right headcount (or close to it) but are undergoing some change that has led to a skills mismatch. That means employees who used to be competent aren’t anymore, and people get cranky under those circumstances. Since shooting your current employees is inhumane, frowned upon, and illegal in most states, here’s a more productive alternative:

1. Communicate the change you’re undertaking and why you’re undertaking it every chance you get. Your whole IT leadership team must preach the change, what it means, its implications and consequences, including the likelihood that not everyone will succeed in the new environment.

2. Hire a few key positions from the outside to lead by example. Hire the best people you can find. You want your employees to think, “None of my co-workers could do that.” As an alternative, bring in a consulting firm to work on projects in “blended teams” with your employees to help them learn the new skills. (Disclaimer – my company is in that business so I’m unavoidably biased in its favor.)

3. Retrain your retrainable employees. It’s cheaper than replacing them. Identify those least likely to succeed, tell them in no uncertain terms your concerns about them, give them every chance you can, and say good-bye to those who fail. You’re responsible for providing opportunity. They’re responsible for taking advantage of it.

4. Recruit replacements from wherever they live. Hire the best people you can find – the best, not the cheapest – and make no apology for doing so.

Great companies need great people. Hiring foreign labor because it’s cheap doesn’t get you great people.

But there are plenty of talented foreign technical professionals who are willing to work harder, and for less money, than their American counterparts. The resentment some American programmers express toward Indian, Pakistani, and Asian programmers is nothing more than simple bigotry.

It’s easy to preach competition when it’s Microsoft against Sun. When it comes to jobs, theory gets real personal, and that just doesn’t bring out the best in people.

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