Let's be clear. I'm not against making people redundant. It was my redundancy that prompted friends and colleagues to ask me to help solve problems in their businesses. That ultimately morphed into a successful consultancy practice. In fact, being made redundant was probably the best career decision I never actually made.
The point I’m about to argue is that an organisation that removes all of its redundancy is likely to be less effective than one that deliberately and conscientiously retains some.
What do I mean by that?
In computing, redundancy means spending a bit more money to ensure that all the critical parts of the system have backups that can be used if there are problems. Like the spare wheel on a car, the more critical bits of the IT infrastructure will have a dedicated stand-by, that’s serviced and upgraded just as much as its live counterpart. And most systems have yet more duplication for developing and testing changes. It’s an approach that’s virtually ubiquitous in IT, yet it might double the cost of system ownership. So why do it?
We do it because we understand the cost of downtime. Delay in being able to process transactions, delay in information flow, and delay in the decisions that may be made as a result. We know that if the IT is down, people will have to work in less efficient ways. Some may struggle to work at all. So we make the call that it’s worth the higher operating cost to reduce the risk, because those systems are critical to the business.
Now ask any CEO which are the most important assets in the business, and it’s rare they’ll point to the systems (though it’s not unheard of). Nine times out of ten, it’s the people.
But redundancy in our people is treated in the opposite way. For people, businesses will invest heavily to remove redundancy, as the value of keeping spare capacity in the organisation, for development, testing and cover for critical failure, isn’t worth the cost. Is this right? Or should we keep subs on the bench, paid-for and maintained, but with nothing to do?
Neither of the above: people make work, and the workload of a team will always grow to fit its size...and then some. Simply adding spare heads into an organisation makes for a more wasteful and less productive business. Instead, the answer lies in clear priorities and rapid re-deployment.
Whether it’s latching on to an innovation or opportunity, or delivering a strategic initiative, the most successful businesses manage to rapidly re-deploy their talent where it’s needed most. It may be a short-lived six-sigma team in a factory, a skunk team working on an innovation, a big-hitting programme team for a core transformation or a secret squirrel squad for an M&A opportunity.
Increasingly though, and maybe it’s driven by the recession, I see organisations trimmed right back to the limit of day-job. I see managers with no headroom to look beyond their targets, stretching their people out to cover the bases. I speak to managers who know they have performance issues in their team, but can’t get a recruit signed off, and can’t hit their targets if they allow a gap to emerge. I get asked to source interims to help deliver strategic programmes, not because they have unique skills, but because the organisation can’t free up its own resource to deliver it.
In these cases it isn’t just the fat that’s been trimmed out; it’s also the capacity to change.
By systematically seeking out, and driving out redundancy, a business becomes more efficient in what it does. But as soon as “what it does” needs to change, it may well find it has no spare capacity to design and drive the changes. Change is increasingly a core and continuous aspect of modern business life. The next time you think about people budgets and headcount, will you factor in the capacity for change?
