It doesn't seem the most pleasant of times for being a worker in a
large company.
Litterally at the minute that I started to write this
article, a news alert popped up that the large Dutch bank ABN Amro is going to
dismiss up to 1375 “superfluous” workers
(link in Dutch).
And also at other financial institutions, commercial service
providers and insurance companies there is a continuous search for ways to
replace ‘expensive, time-restricted and basically unreliable’ workers with digitized and robotized services
that can be operated around the clock the whole year through, in this increasingly 24x7 economy.
Instead of such large companies having thousands of
employees in large office towers who provide manual services on behalf of their
customers during working hours alone, the customers are taught to service themselves via the ubiquitous
online channels or the upcoming robotized telephone, chat and whatsapp
services:
“Do you want to have a
loan, a mortgage or an insurance policy?! Please visit our website at www.yourloan.com (fake address) and fill in the online application form.
Your application will be serviced within 48 hours, after you uploaded all the forms and necessary documentation! And if you want to receive our standard insurance policies really quickly, please use our latest Whatsapp service!”
The obvious result is that the lower and mid-level jobs at
such commercial / financial companies disappear at a blistering speed, while being
temporary replaced by (freelance and project-driven) consulting jobs to enable the deployment of complex
digitization and robotization services. Services that allow banks and insurance
companies to do the same amount of work with only half the personnel or less.
Also in case of more hands-on jobs, like construction worker,
distribution worker, agricultural worker or factory worker, there is a trend to
get rid of people who are on the company's payroll with fixed contracts and replace them
by freelancers or temporary labour, acquired from specialized service
companies or temporary labour agencies.
Great examples are the building company virtually without construction
workers and the large sales & distribution company without
distribution workers on the payroll. The responsibility, the organization and
the ‘hassle’ of having executive personnel are ‘delegated away’ to specialized services companies and what remains are a skeleton crew of high-profile,
strategic personnel and a few invoices per month that must be paid.
At the same time, the traditional small and medium
enterprises – usually a great driver of new jobs – are extremely reluctant to
hire new personnel on fixed contracts. They are either worried about not being
able to dismiss people at will in more difficult economic times or about the
substantial risk of workers getting ill and requiring both a replacement worker
and a long-term sickness payment (i.e. the so-called double whammy). Especially
the latter is a risk that keeps owners of small companies with 5 to 10 people (f.i. retailers) awake
at night.
In especially the Eighties and early Nineties of last
century, it was normal that sick workers received a governmental sickness
benefit (i.e. Algemene Ziektewet) after only a few days of illness. However,
the Dutch government found out that some (especially SME) employers abused this
law in times of weak business, by sending their temporarily superfluous
personnel home on ‘sick leave’ until better times reappeared.
As a consequence this traditional sickness benefit was replaced by a
series of laws in which the employer remained responsible for the sickness
payments for a much, much longer period – up to a year or even longer – and
also was made more responsible for the causes of such cases of sickness leave.
This forced employers to more closely monitor the physical and mental health of
their personnel and led to a host of new businesses, involved with the monitoring and guidance of workers, the so-called Arbo-companies (i.e. labour circumstances).
While this generally was a manageable challenge for larger
companies of at least 50 employers – as general sickness statistics started to
work to their advantage – it often caused grave problems and sometimes even an
untimely end for (very) small companies and f.i. “mom-and-pop” retail stores.
The result was that they tried to prevent personnel from ever working on fixed
contracts and only hired personnel with temporary contracts for a number of
years in a row.
When you look at things like this, employees with fixed
contracts seem to have very little in their favour; for large as well as small
companies. Flexibility is hot and robotization and digitization are even
hotter.
However, you can also look at workers from a different point
of view. Perhaps it’s time to appreciate your workers again and look at them as
the mortar of every company; even if they come with their human peculiarities
and an administrative hassle and even when their productivity looks inferior to
robotized and digitized services. You can do so for a number of reasons.
Do you trust your computers and robots enough to let them
run everything in your company? And do you entrust your suppliers of temporary
labour and commercial services to always keep YOUR priorities at number one and
work at your advantage alone?
Is it not much more convenient and comforting to have a group of loyal
workers around you that are on your payroll and feel really part of your
company's family? People that are willing to run the extra mile when the work requires
that? And people that you can ask about things that went wrong or could be made
better? Your robotized service surely can’t answer your questions and
inquiries, when a customer is offended or goes to your competitors out of the blue.
And do you trust the thesis, that your customers like to
be helped by a robotized telephone operator, to have a positive outcome?! And
that it won’t scare away your elder customers towards your competition, which
does operate a call centre with real employees of their own?
When there are two things that both the robotization and the
outsourcing of core activities – like call centres and distribution departments
– cause, it is that a. customers feel more detached from commercial / financial
services companies (i.e. feel more treated like a number than a customer of
flesh and blood) and b. those human call centre and distribution service workers will
never feel attached to your company in the first place. They work for your company today and for
your competitor’s company tomorrow and don't mind much whether customers run away to your competition. They simply do their job and that's that.
And be sure that your customers notice, whether a call centre employee is really attached to a company on whose behalf he works or just a hired gun from a specialized service provider. So perhaps companies should give the outsourcing of real
core activities a second thought after all.
Last, but not least, there is the issue of SME companies and their personnel.
The legislators (i.e. national government) and the executive
organizations for labour laws and work-related social security (i.e. local
governments, as well as governmental executive bodies, like the Sociale
Verzekeringsbank and the UWV) should think about new sickness laws that are
less radical and ‘life-threatening’ for small companies, in case of long-term
sickness.
On the other hand these laws should still not open the floodgates for abuse of sickness money in
economic hard times for companies. Restoring the situation from the Eighties
would be reckless, but the current situation at the labour market is also
unsustainable. That is one of the challenges that the new Dutch cabinet will have ahead in 2017.
But finally: take a look at the people who work for you and consider
giving them a fixed contract. They might not be so bad after all and they will be grateful and loyal in exchange for that.
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