There was a time when the Big IT firms laying off 500 folks was a big story- now you need to really dig deep in the crevices of the internet to discover that a Cognizant or Wipro has laid off 2000 – but the PR pitch remains the same –“this is our regular performance management exercise and we have to remove the people who have not performed . They were given adequate performance feedback and also PIP- Performance improvement plans”.This is usually followed by an announcement which says that the company is hiring X0,000 from campus this year- a smokescreen which says- everything is fine.
So why is the middle management cannon fodder- the answer is simple- – Greed – Why invest in a perishable resource- when you can get more!! Here is what contributed to this planned obsolescence
- Almost no Business Model Innovation- glorified body shopping models where the middle managers became T&M Managers with fancy titles
- Negligible investment in R&D- the Industry is playing catch-up in almost every tech innovation- AI & ML, RPA and also no world class products
- Inertia of Easy Revenue – When you get cost +30% by creating an army of pixel pushers- why would you want to focus on Productivity
People Leadership Failures
- No Investment in People- 12 days / year/ per person became the holy grail – not the quality of input
- Productivity means working 9 to 7 – 5 days a week and if you do 6th as well- you just might be a High Pot
- Having no idea on how to re-skill people on new technologies
Consequences of People + Business Failures
- Brain- Drain to captives and Startups
- Folks who do not move – run the risk of making themselves obsolete unless they get into top management – where tech skills are immaterial but relationship management and BD get a premium. So basically we have technology companies being run by glorified account managers
- Compensation is non- competitive compared to captives or product or Ecommerce companies .
- Radical suggestion- Have a separate Moonshots company/ R&D firm – with focus on Product creation, IP Creation in RPA, Robotics, ML & AI – Have a separate CEO, separate targets, separate compensation structure and Organisation design
- Take the initiative to retire archaic business models- before they retire you and most of your team
- Reorganise and Get your compensation competitive – at all levels
- If you are too big to Invest in focused/ individualised training & development- give people the freedom to learn whatever they want in 10% of their regular office time – and a tech platform to organise training and development. Open Source it / pay internal trainers. People are smart- they want to improve- free them up.