In recent years, many companies have launched new products or services
while also making cutbacks. Such changes can be vital to a company’s survival,
but employees may find themselves working harder than ever, and facing an
uncertain future.
The language of change
Acquisition: the purchase by one company of the controlling
interest in another.
Alliance: a connection between two organizations for their
mutual benefit.
Flattening: widening the scope of jobs by compressing
organizational hierarchy.
Globalizing: marketing products or services worldwide.
Merger: the combining of two or more organizations into
one.
Privatizing: selling a state-owned firm to the private
sector.
Quality Managing: setting up company systems to monitor
product quality.
Re-engineering: completely rethinking and redesigning
organizational processes.
Restructuring: reorganizing the structure and processes of
work within an organization.
Responding to pressure
The upheaval triggered by the need for cost-cutting and increasing
productivity has two main causes:
Globalization has left local suppliers facing stiff competition
and led to aggressive cost-cutting in the marketplace;
Information technology, including fax machines, e-mail, and video
conferencing, has accelerated the speed at which many business transactions can
be performed, and put pressure on the workforce to be ever more
productive.
Rethinking companies
New competition and pressures on companies to be more productive
have led them to pursue certain strategies that put their workers under stress.
Mergers and acquisitions between corporations have been taking place at an
increasing rate and, when these occur, they usually bring job losses. This is
because they tend to create one large corporation in which key positions at
many levels are duplicated, making redundancies inevitable.
Changing operations
In the search for improvement, companies look closely at how they
operate – the way production processes work, for example, and ways of
keeping track of stock. Many companies have experimented with re-engineering
their structures and involving employees in controlling product quality and
ensuring continuous improvement.
The introduction of robots on to assembly lines has eliminated many
manual jobs once required for mass production, so that manufacturing jobs are
often relatively isolated, with little social contact.
Encountering new work cultures
The changes occurring in the workplace in recent years have
radically altered the work culture of many companies, large and small. For
example, opportunistic takeovers have put old-fashioned organizations into the
hands of ambitious and fast-moving entrepreneurs with very different values.
Widespread privatization has turned state-owned enterprises into private
enterprises, which tend to be more committed to maximizing profit than to
maintaining the workforce.
Reaching the limits
All these changes in the workplace – technical, strategic,
operational, and cultural – have had profound and far-reaching effects
on the employees of the organizations that undergo them. A number of studies
have pointed out that, although workers are adaptable, there are limits to the
amount of change that human beings can absorb. If organizations keep reaching
and exceeding these limits – moving the goalposts – they may find
that eventually their workers can no longer tolerate the demands made of
them.
TIP
Try to anticipate corporate change by constantly updating your
skills.
TIP
Adopt new management ideas only if they are useful – never
adopt what is merely fashionable.
TIP
Protect your job by drawing attention to the value of your
work.
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Take advantage of training schemes to learn as much as you can
about new or different work cultures.
TIP
Identify like-minded colleagues, and work with them to adapt to
change.
