Something Like Late Antiquity Will Happen Again

[pbrower2a]

(10-03-2016, 08:28 AM)Marypoza Wrote:

(10-03-2016, 08:08 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: "Mrs. X is a 55-year-old executive secretary at your company. She and her husband intend to go on a once-in-a-lifetime second honeymoon in Paris, where they will get to enjoy much that they have deferred for years while they were working for your company. She has not worked here solely for the money, which isn't all that much. You couldn't pay her enough for her contributions in part because you would overturn the reality that secretarial and clerical staff would insist on being overpaid. She has her vacation time aligned with that trip. She can;t put it off a month or so without paying hefty fees for rescheduling the second honeymoon, and her husband would have similar difficulties in rearranging things. All of a sudden, as she is in the last days before setting off to the City of Lights, your company undergoes a merger with a failing competitor, and you will need her skills to make the merger work. How do you get her to cancel the trip?"

Here is my answer.

No, you do not disrupt that second honeymoon for the merger. You try to make that merger work without her, or put it off until she has returned from Paris. Is she that important? Yes -- and you want to make sure that she is at her best when the merger goes through.

This second honeymoon represents much that you value in her -- her planning, her foresight, and her commitment. Someone simply putting off a trip to a gambling casino or an amusement park or a camping trip to the Rockies? Such takes little foresight or planning, and the younger worker who gets pressured to put such off for a couple of weeks will enjoy the trip just the same a couple weeks later. You can make all sorts of promises to a younger worker, like job security for making some adjustments.

So you get her to stay to make the merger work on time. But while she is doing paperwork she is thinking about the boat cruise down the Seine for which there is no real equivalent in America. While she is making phone calls to facilitate transfers of assets she is thinking of the stroll down the Champs-Élysées that she might otherwise be doing. While she is making the customer lists of your former competitor yours she contemplates the might-have-been of an irreplaceable journey through a gallery of the finest paintings and sculptures of existence.

Can she do this alone? It means more with her husband. Are you going to risk her marital stability for that? She has loyalties bigger than to her boss and the management of this company. This second honeymoon is no spur-of-the-moment jaunt; it involves virtues that she shows on the job: planning, foresight, dedication, and denial of instant gratification. It might be far easier for your company if she were shallow enough to be interested only in some big-ticket item that she could buy, like some household remodeling, a car, or a boat. But she is 55, and she may see this second honeymoon as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. After all, her husband just got a diagnosis of a terminal condition. Oh, you did not know that? That's why you cannot expect her to put the second honeymoon off. There might not be a next year for the second honeymoon with her husband.

Induce her to defer (really abandon) the second honeymoon, and she might be good only for the merger. You show to your subordinates that the company exists only for making money irrespective of human cost, which puts your firm on the ethical level of a crime syndicate. Oh, there is more to life than making money for your employer? Look also at what it could do to her performance. For the sake of everyone it is best that you accommodate her family life, something more primal to people than the acquisitive instinct.  Within three months she retires anyway because she does not really need the money.

Now if she goes on that second honeymoon? Your staff will enjoy finding out about it on her communications from Paris. Learning that this is a possible objective in life while 30 might bring out the best in other employees. Maybe they will start thinking about long-range plans; maybe they will find that foresight offers rewards. It's easier to work for a company that demonstrates that there is more to life than material gain and indulgence for owners and executives. Doing the right thing isn't easy, but it usually has better consequences.

After the second honeymoon is over you can complete the merger. Or while it is going on you can hire some recent college grads as temporary help to facilitate the merger. Or you can get existing staff to stretch their abilities while she is away. She won't be around in ten years, and you will need someone to do what she has been doing. Maybe she isn't so tech-savvy as those kids. She is 55, and you cannot trust her to be around for ten years. But if her employment outlasts her husband's remaining life, she could be a desirable employee for some time.

So what about the people at the former, but failing company that you are transforming into a subsidiary? Maybe about 10% of them will be lucky enough to keep their jobs. The failing competitor was hemorrhaging good workers, which you can reasonably expect when people aren't getting raises for five years or so. Management was crappy, and you might prefer the temps who coordinated the transformed a company's assets into yours than the people who used to have custody over them.

...The 'right' answer is probably to make promises that she can never accept, offer her a pay raise as an inducement, or threaten her job security.

-- & if she's 55 she'll probably tell them to f off, esp if she gets a widows pension

True. Which is an aspect that I didn't even look at. But even if I did not know of her husband's terminal diagnosis, one may be at a company which, like most others, tells employees to not bring their problems to work. It's dehumanizing, but it is efficient. So she may have not told anyone.

She is 55, and she is working for something other than the money. Maybe she has been taking much leave in her husband's medical crises, which might be a clue. But if she does not take her problems to work, then she may not have told the company.

Letting her go on that second honeymoon is the decent, humane choice. You might want her to stick around after her husband has died. She does her job well enough, and you want her to keep doing her job well.