I was fortunate to start my employment in industry with Oxford Instruments, a well-known and successful technical company. In the course of the 17 years I worked for them I experienced many changes in management style as the company endeavoured to increase productivity. I have spent the last three years working for Oxford Danfysik, formed when Danish company Danfysik bought a small part of the Oxford Instruments Superconductivity business. The following points are garnered from my first hand experiences during restructuring and takeover, from the perspective of an employee at the receiving end.
I would like to highlight some of the keys to success that companies should bear in mind during any change process:
Efficient communication
There seems to be a general belief that more meetings means more communication, and the more slides showing statistics the better...
The truth is very different. How many people groan 'Oh no, not another meeting' and how many managers have come to the triumphant end of a carefully crafted presentation, only to be greeted by a sea of blank faces at the 'any questions?' mark...
A lot of raw information can be disseminated on an internal web site - what people really want from a management (as opposed to technical) meeting is to know 'What does this mean for me?' on a one to one basis.
A 'champagne and cakes' style meeting at the right time speaks volumes for celebrating company changes and successes!
Keeping employee morale and motivation high
The loyalty of employees can be kept high by trustworthy management - this gives 'money in the bank ' to help through the bad times.
Every manager's nightmare is having to announce redundancies. Yet surprisingly, this can work in favour of both parties. For example, our IT group was oversized for a small company; we obviously needed support, but not full time. The solution was to provide sufficient redundancy money and support to staff for a separate outsourced company to be set up, who sold us their services.
Rather than lose valued team members during lean times, we had an unpaid leave scheme, with the managers doing unpaid work to set an example.
It does seem that sudden redundancies, especially when accompanied by the minimum redundancy settlement, are counterproductive in the long term, usually encouraging other people to leave and drastically lowering morale. A voluntary redundancy scheme reduces the fright factor.
Flexible working hours
Managers often worry that people will take advantage of the system, and flexi time schemes are often wrapped up in so much red tape that they could be renamed 'inflexi time,' where, for example, long notice has to be given for a change in working pattern. In fact, it seems the more flexibility granted by management, the higher the productivity of the workforce. The worry that no-one might be there when needed only encourages forward planning, and in practice the availability of key staff on a mobile phone totally removes this worry. There will always be people who prefer working early and those who prefer working late, and for an international company this offers the advantage of greater communication overlap time with customers and suppliers.
Flexible working hours and the option of working from home as appropriate seem to be the top generators of employee satisfaction.