When Beancounters Rule
Just when you think that corporate stupidity can't get any worse, it does. The recent announcement by retailer Circuit City that they were going to lay off 3,400 higher paid workers so they could replace them with low paid new hires is the quintessential beancounter decision that can ruin companies. Here's a few reasons why:1. Lack of expertise kills customer service. My past experience with Circuit City was that customer service was poor already, and now they're going to fire their best people. Even worse, they're a technology retailed, where you'd think skill is kind of important. The message to the public and to their employees is that skill and customer service are not important.
2. Employee morale goes in the pits, dragging customer service down even further. The employee is not valued, just a replaceable commodity.
3. The public announcement creates a backlash against the company for being cruel. Why would anyone go there when there's Best Buy, CompUSA, Radio Shack and many other options just down the street?
Watch the bean counters try to pick up sales the only way they know how - by lowering prices. Now with skinny margins and relatively unskilled help they're competing with Wal Mart. What a business plan for a technology company!
In "Science of Getting Rich" Wallace Wattles has a better idea. He says, "Always give more in use value (to your customers) than you take in cash value. Then you are adding to the life of the world with every business transaction. For your employees, you can organize your business so that it will be filled with the possibility of advancement, so that it will be a sort of ladder by which every employee who will take the trouble may climb to riches for themselves. You don't have to beat up anybody in business. And if you are in a business which does beat people up, get out of it at once."
Create an environment of appreciation and value - for both customers and employees. Jack Canfield has commented on a survey which asked "What really motivates employees?" Supervisors said money was #1, employees said "appreciation". Money was actually #5 on the employee's list, while appreciation was #8 on the supervisor's list! As Canfield says, this is a major mismatch. Of sourse, if you're Circuit City, neither money or appreciation are very important.
Comments?
1 Comments:
Nice post, Wes. Wattles' wisdom really knows no bounds :-)
It never ceases to amaze me how companies like this ever get to be so big in the first place, with this kind of attitude towards their employees - or is one to believe that this kind of attitude only enters a company once it has already become successful? Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between.
Nonetheless, in cutting all those jobs, I'm sure C.C. was quite content to pay the beancounters a huge wage.
The whole debacle does illustrate, IMO, the law of cause and effect (or even Karma, if you will) very clearly and elegantly. Negative intention & action on the part of the company has led to negative reaction from employees and customers alike. Strange that the people at the top of the company, with all their wealth and (one would have previously thought) 'wisdom' have not yet learned this most basic and fundamental of natural laws. For $10, they could have picked up any one of a hundred books that would have told them this. Take the Bible, for instance - and I'm betting there's a good chance some of those involved in the decision to slash jobs are regular churchgoers who never even took the time to contemplate what lies within the pages.
~Life is full of irony.
~Life operates, inexorably, according to fundamental laws.
~Life is about continual learning.
The action of C.C. management is an object lesson for us all, not least the perpetrators themselves, on the truth of the above 3 points!
John, UK
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