Corporate and Personal Responsibility

A short post today on the subject of Corporate Responsibility. There are lots of comments in the media at the moment criticising companies for putting so many good people out of work. Now in some cases that criticism is justified as in some cases companies have jumped in far too quickly and starting laying people off too soon before they had really analysed the full costs of doing that. Usually, companies factor the cost of an employee as several times that persons salary package! So losing just one good person is expensive, but actually laying people off that you may later need is extremely expensive! But most companies are acting responsibly, they have to! They have to answer to their shareholders and boards of directors ultimately, and they are often caught in a very difficult position.

On one hand if they lay people off too soon they are hampering the chance for the business to grow again when the times improve and are spending a lot of money in redundancy payouts to boot! But on the other hand if they keep on employing too many staff at a loss for too long then they are putting the whole financial foundations of their business in peril. They are caught between the proverbial "rock and a hard place" or maybe that is just a saying where I come from.

Some companies are getting it wrong and have had to rehire people later that they retrenched, but most often this is not the case. Companies in general try to do the right thing by their people and their community, they are aware they have a social responsibility as well as one to their shareholders, in fact the two are closely linked.

So instead of criticising upper management for the tough decisions they have to make (and yes some will get it wrong, don't we all) I suggest employees in companies that are on the "edge" try to help out. They can knuckle down and really try to help their company out, work a bit harder, be more focused, ask your manager how you can help out more (that will be an unusual concept for some but try it), pull together as one team to get through the tough times. Because those companies and teams that don't will not survive, they will fail.

There are two sides to the responsibility equation then: Corporate responsibility to their share holders, community, partners, customers and employees; and individual employee responsibility to their employer, their team mates, their families and their communities. Both Companies and individual employees are jointly responsible, and both have to learn to adapt and work together to get through these times.

Businesses, Companies and individual employees who can't adapt will have to watch as their business or job or both becomes extinct - just ask the dinosaurs what happens if you don't learn to adapt!


Owen