Keep People Gainfully Employed

Tasks such as software projects invented and developed just for the purpose of saving jobs.

This has the makings of an organizational AntiPattern. Not the keeping people employed bit, but the roundabout and thinly disguised ways in which it is done.

I've noticed that it's often better in some cases to do nothing than to do something. But there's something about the way we value things (maybe it's an AmericanCulturalAssumption) that makes us unable to tolerate that situation for very long.

So, for example, we leave a managers or individual contributors in place causing immeasurable harm instead of helping them go somewhere else, to targeted retraining, or home to get to know their family again, or on a sabbatical in personal study, or just about anything else.

One can argue that it creates too much strategic risk for a country to send most manufacturing and tech overseas. If the source is cut off due to war or some natural disaster, the economic damage to such a country could be considerable.

Rings a bell; I think I'm right now seeing this happen, where one person who recently joined us has already wreaked havoc with social dynamics that were fine until then, but has been allowed to stay on for far longer than reasonably acceptable, in part (though in part only, life's never that simple) because of a misguided wish to "think of him as part of the team" and to "respect his wish to be part of the team". Which roughly translates as "I should really fire that guy whom I shouldn't have hired in the first place, but I don't have the guts to look him in the face as I fire him". It strikes me that one attribute of good leadership is the ability to face up to unpleasant decisions. -- LaurentBossavit

I think France should experiment with "gradual unemployment". The salary of the worse performers are allowed to shrink say 7% a year, down to minimum wage. The worse part about unemployment is having the carpet suddenly yanked out from under you. If it is yanked out gradually instead, then preparations or improvements can be made. This could give them the best of both worlds: protectionism but with incentives.

This seems like an AntiPatternCollision? between the WarmBodies AntiPattern and the CornCob AntiPattern., but introduces a new force... something like "ResistingFiringAnyoneUnderAnyCircumstance?"... Worth studying a bit anyway ;-) --SkipMcCormick

Try NeverFireAnyone

CategoryEmployment