I work for the government. I have long learned that no employee is essential. Time and time again an employee has left, and folk have wailed, “How will we go on?” But, somehow or another, you do.
So I’m sure the same will happen in this case. But we’ve been hammered in terms of staff, with no hiring to replace attrition. Short example - when I was hired 8 years ago, everyone in my position had 2 staffers assigned to each of us. Now 8 of us share 8. We had 5 schedulers in our office. Now 4 schedulers handle 5 offices. OK - I’ll grant that we might have been overstaffed then, and automation helps efficiency, but NOT THAT MUCH!
This one person, I’ll call her Manda, is the general administrative assistant. Has been here forever. Knows everything. The hardest worker, with the best attitude. And a week from Friday is her last day.
The funniest thing is, back during the most recent shutdown, they furloughed all non-essential employees. Guess what? Manda was THE ONLY employee out of 50 or so who was deemed non-essential and had to go home!
Excuse me here where I ratchet my standards and expectations down a little lower yet again! :mad:
Sorry - just felt the need to vent a bit. But this “do more with less” crap really gets old.
There is a discussion that I have been involved in multiple times over the years. It goes something like this - there is always (usually) an employee who is a superstar. They just naturally know more than anyone else, and take care of more than anyone else - by a long shot. They are the go-to person for getting things done. Usually they seem a little underpaid, but are probably topped out for their role. But they aren’t really going to get promoted because that would mean turning a superstar worker into a maybe ok manager.
But, and it’s a big but, from a management perspective this is a problem. Nothing really gets done right without them, they have become indispensable. Nobody should be indispensable. By them always taking care of everything they are actually preventing other employees from learning and developing. Or at the very least, preventing management from discovering where they need to build competencies in the team.
So, one out-of-the-box solution - get rid of them!
This happened in a company I worked for… and I was one of the superstars. There were three of us, one on each shift. We pretty much ran the company. But the owners had made some really stupid decisions, and the company was having financial problems. So they decided to save money by letting go the three highest-paid employees. From what I heard, none of the other employees picked up the slack and took control of the work. After a few months, the company went bankrupt.
If they are preventing others from learning, they aren’t superstars, they are dangerous. More likely management is not assigning anyone to work with them to learn the ropes because the superstars can handle it. Which means management is incompetent. Management needs to consider what happens if the superstar gets run over by a bus.
Not that I’m complaining. I worked one day a week for four months on full pay because they didn’t listen to me when I told them I needed someone full time to train before I retired. The people I did train over that period have left and my software is falling apart. But so is the division, not because of me though.
I’ve been in that position, usually ends up with me being the “golden child” who can do no wrong. Farging hate it because you can never have a bad day. Now if I find myself slipping into that spot I annoy the hell out of my bosses by insisting on having a helper I can train and mentor on my methods. I have in fact risked my job with my current employer over that very issue
I once worked in a job where my entire team was let go in the space of a couple of months. I was utterly convinced chaos would ensue… we maintained at least 20-30 business applications.
But apparently the world didn’t cave in after we left. Our stakeholders just adapted, I guess.
Some companies lost nearly their entire workforce on 9/11. Yet some of these companies were back up and running in days/weeks.
I guess the lesson is… none of us are as important as we think we are.
We went from a department of 7 to… 2 of us. Same amount of work, which meant I was billing 60 hours a week. When I hit 80 hours a week for three weeks in a row, AND was told at a review by the clueless owner, “Your timesheets say 82 hours last week, but I really didn’t see you working all that time.” Well, no kidding! I was working from 6am til after midnight some nights, while you were rolling in at 10 and out by 5 on the dot.
So I quit to start teaching, and they went through 3 replacements for me in short order. Then ended up hiring 2 people to do my job, and 2 to do the assistant’s (mine had quit just before I did).
Gotta admit, my cockles were warmed by not being able to be easily replaced.
A while back, we were having a similar discussion on another website, and one poster said something like, “No matter how important a person’s job may be, if they die or leave suddenly for other reasons, within a week their job will probably be absorbed by their colleagues, and in a year, they will barely be remembered.”
I’ve been in that situation many times also. And while what you say is true, what I noticed (that management apparently never did) was that a lot of tasks just didn’t get done. Typically the tasks that are important for the security and operation of the business but aren’t visible. Like, well, computer security, backups, disaster preparedness. And of course training and mentoring the new people. The businesses all kept on running, but not at all optimally.
As a small business owner myself who is in that situation from the opposite method (launch on a penny, working hard to grow revenue enough to hire staff) I fully understand that you just can’t be optimal all the time. However, I do find it interesting some of the choices that were made by my employers who didn’t seem to appreciate the potential costs of things like hardware failures with untested or no backups. It’s also very sad that when the crap does hit the fan, the typical “remedy” is to first find a scapegoat.
When I started my first job after school, there was one guy who considered himself and was treated as hot shit. Let’s call him Mike. A total asshole iMO, who horded info, and bragged about making young woman employees cry. About 5 years later he died (actually, was shot in an attempted robbery while on work travel! :eek:) But I remember a couple of years later, after some new people were hired, someone mentioned this guy and one of the newbies said, “Mike who?” Perfectly understandable, but made an impression on me.
The employee I mention is the jack of all trades who is largely responsible for making our office run smoothly. The vast majority of our support staff is of the, “it’s not my job” type. Manda knows what needs to be done, anticipates what will be needed in the future, etc. Takes care of things BEFORE they become problems. Maybe not really a superstar - just a really solid employee. But she SEEMS like a superstar, compared to the rest of the staff.
She accepted a position with higher pay and a much shorter commute. Impossible to blame her. In a couple of years, new employees (if we are ever allowed to hire again) will say, “Manda who?” And will wonder why our office has been out of toner for the past 2 weeks, and whose job it is to order more… :rolleyes:
We’ve got this situation where I work at the moment - Management and board have discussions aplenty about key staff retention and succession planning, but it’s all incredibly fruitless, seemingly because:
We won’t increase salary to try to retain the key individuals (even if we thought that might work - giving them a pay rise might stop them from looking elsewhere, but it also might give them a stronger and more credible bargaining position in a different role somewhere else)
We won’t free up the time to get them to document their knowledge, because their time is too valuable applying that knowledge
We won’t appoint a successor and start knowledge sharing, because we currently have the ‘right’ number of seats filled in the team.
So what we will do instead is… nothing - until one day, those staff members find themselves another job - then we spring into action; offering them deals to stay, which they always decline, because they feel that if we cared, we’d have done something before they served notice.
So they leave, and we suffer a significant productivity and efficiency hit until someone else steps up, or steps in, and we start the whole stupid cycle again
About a year ago my business manager, who had been with me for 17 years, gave her two weeks notice. She was the one who did payroll, paid the bills, dealt with government bs, etc.
I was dumbfounded. If instead of being 60, I’d been 65, I would have called it quits. I knew absolutely nothing about the business side of my business and it was too hectic for me to spend those two weeks learning.
I found out later that her giving notice was meant to be my “wake up call” about how important she was. She told people that when I begged her to stay, she would. It turns out she was dumbfounded by my nonchalance and too embarrassed to cancel her notice.l
I did not want to hire someone to replace her, mainly because I had no one to train a replacement. Instead, I figured out how to do the bare minimum I had to do to keep things running. Today is payday, for instance. I couldn’t figure out how to use the payroll program she used to use, so I do it longhand with pen, paper, and calculator.
Especially if management’s attitude is “We can do just fine w/o them.”
Another example - we had one employee - the lowest paid person in the office. Her main job was to make calls to people with appointments, to ensure that they would be coming in. (If not, the time and resources could be used for other things.) When she left, mgmt decided the job of “callbacks” could simply be divided among the other staff. Guess what? Anyone surprised that no-shows have increased significantly? But, hey - increased inefficiency doesn’t show up on a balance sheet as neatly as one meagre salary…:rolleyes:
I’m about to retire (again) and my boss has known this was coming for a year, since I asked to be cut back to part time in January. Dec 13 is my date.
I know I’m not essential in that there are at least 3 other drafters, plus the engineers know how to do drafting, even tho they don’t like to. But I do know I’m the most productive drafter, and I’d love to be a fly on the wall to see if Miss On-Her-Phone-All-Day is forced to work more.
Some people are harder to replace than others. I retired from teaching in June of 2017. The replacement they got for me quit in June of 2018. The replacement they got for her quit in June of 2019. The replacement they got for her has already been talking about quitting in June of 2020. It isn’t that I am special. It is that it is difficult to find people that can last in that district in any student-contact position. When any of the veterans leave there is a long period of chaos until they find somebody strong enough mentally and emotionally to do the job long term.
“We the few,
Who do so much with so little,
Are now expected to do everything
With nothing.”
I retired at the end of 2005 from the State of Confusion…er, I mean California.
I really don’t want to start my day all depressed, talking about the downhill slide.
The delays in the budget were always memorable. And running out of funds for “office stuff” long before the end of the fiscal year was quite amusing. People were stealing office supplies from each other, and we’d steal copy paper from other units. It was quite hilarious to smuggle office supplies INTO work, instead of taking stuff home.
The amusing part was when “somebody” decided that contracting out work saved money.
Golly, the hours and hours we few left wasted FIXING the damned contracted work to bring it up to State standards.
The old-timers were our most valuable resource. As they aged and then retired or died, quality jumped off a cliff and committed suicide.
True, but even your example shows it depends on how you define “replaced.”
There are plenty of times a star employee leaves (for whatever reason), and the organization is noticeably worse off.
Just because the entire company did not implode doesn’t mean that there weren’t consequences. Some consequences may be noticeable by management (but unlikely to be acknowledged) like lost revenue. Others may be less noticeable like increased stress of remaining employees which may lead to others leaving months later.
No one is irreplaceable. But there is a cost of losing certain people. And with some businesses, it does cost lives. Studies have shown that death rates do rise in hospitals and nursing homes when key/critical people are suddenly gone.
I just left my management/administrative/patient care position and moved to a pure patient care position at an institution much closer to home. My departure leaves a big hole in my old institution’s operation. It is a high stress institution, with 30 new patients coming in every workday, on average. Some perfectly healthy, some with one foot in the grave and another on a banana peel. I spent over 17 years there, taking ownership of overall patient care, and seeing to it that patients were prioritized properly, focusing on cancers and heart failures and respiratory or liver failures rather than spending much time on chronic headaches, functional low back pain, and other less urgent conditions. I had a great team under me but they relied on me to help them decide whose needs were dire vs. urgent vs. routine vs. not true needs at all.
And now they’re experiencing a lot more dysfunction and no one else has yet stepped up to take ownership. Of course they knew I was leaving 6 months ago, but given that it’s a government operation, they have not yet even started advertising for my replacement. Nor was there anyone I could pass my institutional knowledge on to.
They’ll muddle along. But it’s pretty certain there will be suboptimal outcomes for patients due to my departure. For a while, anyway.
And only now, with the pressure on me significantly reduced do I realize just how much pressure I was suffering under all that time. My life has gotten better thanks to this change in my job. But it’s possible people will die because of that.
I’ve found that more often than not, the real ways that departing employees continue to impact their former workplace is in the “soft” things, not the enumerated job tasks and responsibilities. For example, someone may not be a rock star, but they may know the institutional ins and outs of how to get stuff done, may have personal reputation or clout to get stuff done, or things like that.
I was one of those people at my last job- while I was one of those rockstars in terms of ability to do my job, where I really had it all over my co-workers is that I had a whole lot of personal clout and institutional know-how. I’d been there a long time, done a lot of different stuff, and met all the major players across the IT department and business. So not only did I know who to contact, but I had built the relationships over time such that if I asked for something and needed something non-standard like a rush, or benefit of the doubt, or whatever, I could get it (or at least get closer to it) by just calling the right person and discussing it with them.
So when I left, my successors all had great talent in the enumerated job responsibilities and skills, but none of them had the relationships and know-how within the organization that I had. I suspect that when things got hairy, things got done slower with a lot more stress and confusion after I left.
Problem is, there’s no good way for management to enumerate or measure that kind of thing, so as far as they’re concerned it doesn’t really exist.
