(Published September 8, 2008)
Well, September 1 has come and gone, which means that Major League Baseball teams can now expand their rosters from 25 active players to 40. My beloved Red Sox didn’t do much of anything in the way of expansion. Since they have several players on the disabled list, most of the players they would have considered bringing up from the minors are already here. Boston is in an unusual situation this year in that their AAA team, the Pawtucket Red Sox, and their AA team, the Portland Seadogs, are both going to their respective playoffs, which start this week, with Boston itself likely to make the post season. Since Pawtucket and Portland are the teams from which Boston would call up players, they don't want to decimate the younger teams in order to help the big club. Will that leave them with holes of their own to fill? Only time will tell. That's the question: How can they utilize the players they have to maximize the strength of all three teams and fill all the holes created by injuries and internal transfers from team to team?
It's always a struggle, isn't it? I talked last week about cutting hours instead of people, but sometimes that just isn't possible. When you do have to cut people, there's always the question of whom you can cut and where those job duties can be reassigned. Can you do internal transfers? Do you transfer the duties from one employee to the other? Where can you make the cuts with the least amount of damage?
When we let people go, we have to determine the best way to utilize those that remain. When we eliminate Sally's position in Accounting, do we dump all of Sally's duties on Joe, split Sally's duties between Joe and Dan, or do we transfer Peggy from Operations to Accounting?
I've recently come to understand that to a lot of employees, "Your position is being eliminated" translates to, "We don't need anyone performing your duties anymore." So when they find out that their duties have been transferred to a co-worker, they assume that the reason they were given for the elimination of their position was a pretext for discrimination. After all, their position was eliminated, so how is it that someone is still doing their job? They don't realize that "position elimination" is a function of employee count, not job duties.
So when you're making your decisions, keep that in mind. It goes back to my hobby horse: communication. If you're laying people off, it's only right to give them some understanding of how their position came to be chosen. One thing we can never forget in HR is the perception of discrimination. Yes, it's an annoying item to have to factor into the decision, but it's one we can never lose sight of. Employees need to understand what the new organization will look like if they're going to understand that they were not singled out for something they did wrong, or worse, for some protected characteristic.
Enjoy the post season!
Catherine Bannon is an HR consultant in Marshfield, MA (catherine.bannon@gmail.com). Bannon worked for 10 years in HR management before starting her consulting practice.
Home
