The Victims of Change
Peter de Jager is a provocative Speaker,
Writer and Consultant. His primary focus in on how we manage change,
technology and the future. In addition to speaking at conferences
worldwide, he's also written monthly columns for Municipal World and
Computing Canada. His goal is always to question what we
think is so, and in so doing perhaps open up new opportunities. If you'd like permission to reprint any
of Peter's articles, please contact him directly. You can contact him at Or sign the Guest
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pdejager@technobility.com
Sooner or later, every organization, every manager and every employee must grapple with the reality that either they, or one or more of their employees/peers, will lose their jobs due to ‘Change’. More to the point? Often, the decision to embrace that specific Change will be a conscious one, made with the full knowledge it will cost people their livelihood.
The type of Change doesn’t matter. It might be a new technology, a merger, a change in organizational focus or a batch of new political masters who decide to sweep the room clean and start over. What matters are the personal dislocations caused by the Change in question. How will we respond to the individuals affected? How will we deal with the fact that our personal decision to embrace this Change has a significantly negative consequence for others?
If you’ve asked this question of yourself with respect to any Change you’ve implemented, then you’re doing more in this area than most. Whether you can take comfort in that or not is up to you. The question of ‘Change Victims’ is a real one, New technologies or processes often displace workers. By definition, the function of ‘new’ is often to make the ‘old’ redundant – sometimes the ‘old’ we’re
obliquely referring to, is ‘us’.
To make this exploration a little bit emotionally easier to read, let’s assume it’s the ‘organization’ and not ‘us’ directly who decided this Change was necessary. The organization, in order to reduce costs, moves forward with a more effective process which doesn’t compromise the quality of products & services. As a result, people lose their jobs.
To seize upon a displacing Change without considering the impact on employees is not uncommon. As to whether or not it is ‘moral’ is another matter entirely, one I’ll leave for ethicists to debate. Regardless of whether or not such practices are moral or not, they do have inevitable consequences.
Employees Remember
The survivors of any one particular round of Change displacement inevitably ask themselves, “Is this how the organization will treat me, when something comes along that can replace us?”. The amount of loyalty & dedication they afford the organization in the future is in direct proportion to the amount of caring and compassion the organization displayed to employees in the past. It’s not a complicated equation – and it’s one that the organization controls.
Putting aside the contentious questions of what an organization is obligated to do for their employees, there’s the legitimate question of what they’re capable of doing.
There are actions we’re all familiar with which nearly everyone agrees border on cruelty.
1) Layoffs without notice, especially close to the holiday season.
2) Terminations affecting those who are on the threshold of some important anniversary. Eg.
Eligibility for a pension, advancement or anything that would have been of benefit to the employee if the Change had been delayed a short period of time.
3) Terminations/layoffs made after management has assured staff that no layoffs/terminations would occur.
Repositioning the Displaced
Helping an employee transition via re-training is one option. Another is to reposition the employee to some other function within the organization. This is one of those situations where the employee’s ability and willingness to learn new things is crucial. If the employee fundamentally does not want to learn a new skill, then they are deciding that obsolescence is preferable to change. An irrational, though common, response to this type of change.
Other Options
There aren’t too many options available other than ‘retraining/repositioning’ and ‘treating people fairly’… One important aspect to the ‘displacement by change’ challenge is that people aren’t machines. We, people that is, are multi-functional – if an employee is good at something, then even if a Change makes them 100% obsolete in their old position – the chances are better than good they only become obsolete in one area – not all areas.
Of course, there’s always one other option.
Captain of their own Ship
The other side of the coin is that the employee can, I’m reluctant only for ‘Politically Correct’ reasons to use the word ‘must’, take responsibility for their own future. Unlike Diamonds, there is no guarantee that any skill is “forever”… A flint knapper has no place in a modern knife factory – a pen & paper draughtsman has no place in a modern architect’s office, a blood letting Doctor has no place at my bedside. The list is endless, and tirelessly growing. Almost all the skills we have today WILL become obsolete before we retire. Anyone who thinks otherwise is going to have to get used to being stunned and surprised by each transition.
Putting aside the issue of what does the Organization ‘owe’ the employee – the truth of the matter is that there is no person more qualified, more motivated, more compelled to manage job displacement than the employee threatened by Change. Constant career training, regardless of what the organization is providing, is the best strategy to guarantee security of employment, if not job security.
Back to the Organization?
It might sound like a cliché, but if an organization wishes to assist their employees through displacement Change, then glorifying our ability to learn new things is a best first step. This means, that training budgets must increase beyond today’s paltry pittance, and such budgets must acquire a certain robustness allowing them to persist at consistent levels through downturns in business.
It may be shouting into the wind to insist that training is not a luxury, it isn’t something we only do when times are good. It’s what we must do all the time, in order to survive when things are different. Training isn’t restricted by any federal legislation. The
opportunities to increase the education of all employees are endless – brown bag lunch learning sessions – are easy and inexpensive to
initiate. It doesn’t matter so much what is being learned – what does matter is that learning the ‘new’ becomes the norm – so that when the ‘old’ becomes obsolete, we’re eagerly anticipating the ‘new’, rather than dreading it.
If the desire is to increase an organization’s ability to change, then it must increase its
ability to learn.
© 2009 Peter de Jager – Peter speaks passionately about Change, because once upon a time, he was a lousy practitioner of the Art of Change. You can listen to him at webinars.technobility.com
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