Category: Human Resources

Big Tech: Is it in turmoil?

Posted on by The Information Badger in Business, Change, Human Resources, Information Technology, Transformation

The Badger joined a local community group on Facebook during the pandemic. This week he left it because postings have become dominated by niff-naff and trivia.  Although it’s been interesting to see how posts to the group have changed over time, the Badger’s now got better things to do than see content that ranges from requests for spare cardboard boxes to cat-sitting!  What’s this got to do with Big Tech in turmoil? The link is subtle, but it’s real; it’s the act of change and leaving.

Big Tech – a convenient phrase for companies that provide online services that the public uses in daily life – has been announcing significant job cuts over the last six months. Meta, for example, has recently announced further major layoffs to take effect by the end of April and May 2023, and, as the Badger writes,  Amazon have announced a cut of another 9000 jobs.  According to Computerworld, the pace of job cuts will rise across the entire tech sector throughout this year. It’s a view that the Badger shares.

Many have commented on the reasons for these layoffs – see, for example, here – but fundamentally it’s really simple. Big Tech is having to change to adapt to a new world, market, and economic reality. Change is painful, just look at Twitter, especially for those who lose their jobs with their employer. What’s happening with Big Tech, however, is just part of the circle of life for any commercial organisation, large or small, in any market sector.

Big Tech is not immune to having to deal with decisions taken during the pandemic on staffing levels that haven’t worked out. Nor is it immune to the cutbacks and changing behaviours of the consumers, businesses, and advertisers that underpin their business models. It’s not immune to ever-growing competition from peers and rivals, tightening regulation, inflation and rising costs, and the need for adopting cleverer automation to keep operational efficiency at a peak. The latter alone drives a need for fewer people. The pandemic, geopolitical events, and changing world markets have made some kind of reset in Big Tech companies inevitable with some employees, as always, part of the fallout.

So, is Big Tech in turmoil? No. It’s just going through a part of the circle of life that all businesses go through. It’s worth remembering that when big oak trees shed their acorns, some of those acorns go on to become new oak trees. Some of those losing their jobs will start new businesses that flourish, and others will go on to spread their knowledge and experience more widely through taking new jobs outside the tech sector. The Badger believes there’s a certainty for those being let go in Big Tech’s reset, namely, that they as individuals will cope. Why? Because as the dominant species on our planet, humans are fundamentally resilient, adaptable, and resourceful.

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Think differently about your performance appraisal with your boss…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Business, Delivery, Education, Human Resources, Information Technology, Leadership & Management, Learning

The reactions of people who’ve just had a performance appraisal with their boss varies enormously and also highlights how different we are as individuals. Personal reactions, of course, cover a wide spectrum. The Badger’s experience, however, is that while a person’s demeanour and body language says a lot about their reaction, most people share little more than the odd comment about their appraisal with others. There are always, of course, people who think they’ve been treated poorly and say so to anyone who will listen. In the Badger’s experience, such individuals tend to be self-centred, averagely talented, poor listeners, and they normally have egotistic or narcistic personalities.  These individuals, and those at the other end of the spectrum who are just downright lazy, unproductive, and permanently negative,  tend to share their displeasure widely and keep HR functions busy with claims of unfair treatment.

A youngster in their first job since leaving University 15 months ago whined to the Badger this week that their appraisal had been a shock and unfair. The youngster, hungry for rapid career and salary progression, unfortunately failed to recognise that they haven’t adjusted to working life as well as their peers. The Badger explained this, and in the course of doing so remembered some wisdom from a training course he attended many years ago. On that course, a behaviour expert, building on the sport coaching work of Tim Gallway, emphasised that we should think about individual performance using the simple equation ‘Performance = Talent – Interferences’. If someone has 100% Talent, then their Performance is never 100% because there are always Interferences from personal and/or organisational factors. Personal interferences come, for example, from lifestyle, health, family and/or caring responsibilities. Organisational interferences come, for example, from skill set mismatches with work role, adequacy of role definition, relationships with leaders and work colleagues, organisational bureaucracy, and factors like organisational dynamism and workforce stagnation if business growth is poor.

The behaviour expert’s key message was that everyone has Interferences, so no one can ever perform at 100%! Interestingly, they used the same equation to describe the performance of a company. In this case, Talent represents a company’s portfolio of  products and services, and Interferences are largely the policies, processes, and  controls that influence the delivery of the portfolio to clients. Bigger companies tend to have more Interferences than smaller ones, and no company ever performs at 100%, although clever accounting and expectation management often masks this!

So, think about your performance appraisal in the terms above. Your Talent is constant, so your Performance dips when Interferences rise. Eventually Interferences will reach a level that makes you feel like doing something different with your life. It’s very empowering when this happens, because it definitively changes the way you approach your appraisal with your boss.