Oofki.Net

During a time of an economic crisis, companies perform massive layoffs, reoraganizations, and other things.  Basically cutting costs and reducing ineffeciencies is the name of the game in such times.   This also may include highly paid management taking paycuts.  All of those are natural - understanable;  Like a person, a company must also survive and sacrifice to do so during bad times.

On the other things that should not be taken away once previously offered as a perk, although it does happen.  For example, many companies give their employees free coffee; that’s a pretty basic perk, a relatively in expensive perk for a multi-million or billion dollar company.  That is not to say some perks are not excessive.

In the case that a company performs massive layoffs and pay cuts employees will already be in edge.  Knowing that the economy is bad, there is a fear in a worker for being let go.  When an employees witnesses their fellow workers being let go left and right, the anxiety increases - the fear increases.

At this point people are working under increased stress and anxiety levels.  Performance is bound to decrease.  Now we add the last factor - taking away from the people who are already scared that they might lose their job at any point.  So now its time to make other cuts, little things, some could say - petty things.   Coffee, reimbursement for travel, for phone usage, for internet usage.  It is both further frightening to an employee and it causes anger and distrust at the same time.  It is frightening because questions start to be asked:  Can my company really no longer afford a coffee that costs the company 12 cents to provide to me?  Are things that bad?  And anger - it is just a natural reaction to the situation.

I am sure there are benchmarks, numbers, and statistics that have to do with the happiness of an employee to their productivity levels.  I do not have access to those, that is not my field of expertise.  However, can a cup of coffee really cost a company that much money, that it needs to be taken out of the budget?  Even if 1 Million dollars a month was spent on free coffee, how does that relate to a multi-billion dollar companies profit.  The answer is, it hardly does, it hardly scratches it.

Is this backwards thinking?  Should employees not be treated better then ever, to make up for what is being lost?  As stated before, productivity is decreased, people are in fear, people literally scared.  How can you take away even more from people.  How can you expect to work in fear?  That practice sounds familiar doesn’t it.