More Cuts

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I may have mentioned a few weeks ago about my bet that redundancies would be announced on January 16th. I was about 5 weeks too early in my reckoning, apparently.
Today 500 reduncancie at Vodafone UK were announced.
The odd thing is that the redundancies have already started, two weeks ago in Vodafone Group. The facilities project manager for the Paddington project, as well as another person in facilities, I heard directly from them, had been made redundant. Very strange, as he was quite good at his job, and genuinely cared. Then I hear that Simon Lewis, the Group Communications Director, has left, as has the head of internal communications, several other people within internal comms, as well as several people in the Corporate Social Responsibility team. Next I hear about some internal audit people gone. But there has been no announcment.
We learned more from Bloomberg than from any communication from the company. Perhaps that is because internal comms is not functioning? Quite possibly. However, it was the CEO's business manager that took over as head of corporate affairs, which absorbs communications, internal and external, and one would think that if she was involved that, naturally, something would be communicated. I have known her since my Japan days, and would give her very high marks when she was the manager for Bill Morrow, our CEO there, as well as Vittorio Colao here.
This reminds me a bit of when Arun Sarin sent David Jones, formerly CEO of Vodafone Netherlands, to Japan to straighten things out as the COO there. Everyone knew, from day one, that he was there to make a show of exerting central group control over Vodafone Japan. He made no attempt to speak to employees, never addressed all employees, even when given the chance at an annual event we held, opting instead to speak on video. He, also, was very quiet right up until the day that he offered all employees the chance to take voluntary redundancy. Twenty five percent of all full-time employees quit the company, receiving quite a good package. Many were the most able people, since the package was so generous that if you were good at your job the temptation was clearly there to take the package and then start at a new job. And since the majority of workers were non-regular employees, so called contractors, the employees really did have the role of driving things, and that was really lost after the 'restructuring'.
He stayed on afterwards, but it was a miserable failure. His people skills, never good in the first place, led to new lows in morale as draconian measures such as 'every trip outside of Japan must first be approved by David Jones' were implemented, but it was never possible to get an appointment to actually get anything approved. I used to send one woman on my team up to his office at 6 pm on Fridays, because we figured out that was the best time, everyone else gone drinking. Also, she was quite cute, which I found really helped, as he wouldn't give me the time of day.
Ironically, it is another former Vodafone Netherlands CEO that is again in the drivers seat. Not knowing Guy Lawrence well, I wouldn't venture to say that he was responsible for this round, since it has apparently been planned for awhile. I would say, however, that Vodafone UK seem to have only two pages in their playbook: Redundancies and Outsourcing.
As a Vodafone Group employee, the complete lack of communication on what, if anything, will happen to us, hasn't been comfortable, and because the rumours didn't specify whether it was Vodafone UK or Vodafone Group or both sorts of employees which would be made redundant, it was very hard to tell where we stand. It still is.
Perhaps the fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) of the past few days are fully justified, as there are always those willing to fall back on tired managment techniques in an effort to show how tough they are, how much 'fat'--as if people were an expendable resource--they can cut. Irony of ironies, these 'change programs' or whatever other current euphemism for large scale firings are called, cost quite a lot in the first year in severance costs. By the end of year two, there is a significant chance that the company has hired other people for the roles that were cut, or is using contractors for it, an option that is actually more expensive in the short, medium, and long-term economically unless your entire business model is based on the outmoded industrial legacy of layoffs, which make much less sense in a business where the number of people tied to the scale of the product being delivered is quite small: Our network still needs to function, our billing still needs to work, our portal still needs to deliver content, our call centre staff have no fewer people today than they did yesterday calling to ask for help. In this sense, we are truly post-industrial, in the sense that we are selling a service where each employee is not necessarily directly tied to the scale of it's use. Unlike auto workers, whose productivity and their use to the company is tied to how many cars they can build, and how many of those cars the company can sell, we don't build anything. Nearly everything has been outsourced, nearly all differentiating factors have been extinguished, and FUD is not a great working environment.
Back at group, the randomness of some of the trickle of redundancies I have heard about does create a fear.
I shall be interested in whether our hermit leader explains the grand strategy he has been working on. People who actually know anything are being incredibly tightlipped.
Fuk this FUD. Not only did 500 people get fired, but our volleyball club members, most of them Vodafone UK people, were in no mood for games tonight, so it got cancelled.