Editor’s note: This article was first published in August 2012, in the middle of Spain’s economic crisis. It reflects the circumstances of that time, including closures, temporary contract suspensions, early retirements and redundancies.
This seemingly endless economic crisis is causing incalculable damage. Not surprisingly, every day brings more alarming, sad and, in many cases, unfair stories: companies closing down, employees whose contracts are temporarily suspended, early retirements and paid redundancies to cut headcount.
These are harsh ways of cutting a company’s wage bill. They lower costs and chase better profitability, while relentlessly swelling what is currently the largest “company” in Spain, known as the Instituto Nacional de Empleo (the national employment office).
They are not the only solutions. Other employees are moved to a job that doesn’t match their training. What happens to them?
The first response is to accept the new situation (what choice do they have?), because at the end of the day you have a salary that pays your bills. But in many cases these are people with highly technical training who suddenly find themselves doing very different tasks, jobs that have little or nothing to do with the ones they were hired for and trained to do.
Human resources works on this in two very different ways, with personal and professional measures.
Personal
At the very least, the intention should be to fit the person to the job in the most feasible and least harmful way possible, even if that intention is sometimes very hard to carry out.
HR is responsible for keeping track of leaves of absence and looking for vacancies to fill; then comes reorganising work teams, leadership styles and adaptation.
Professional
Here there is a competency that concerns the employee directly, “adaptability to change”, and a task that is the company’s responsibility, known as “training”.
Adaptability to change is the professional competency that all of us employees have to adapt to the job we hold, its working procedures, its rules and so on. The need for it may come from the organisation moving forward or from a change of professional activity, popularly known as a job transfer.
In either situation, employees must know how to adapt to the job they are doing. It’s like the chameleon, which adapts to its habitat according to its needs at any given moment. A reptile that does not adapt to the environmental conditions it needs to survive is hunted down and wiped out by its predator.
And what is work? Your survival habitat, which, according to Maslow’s theory, lets you move up through your needs until you reach full personal satisfaction.
The company must be aware that a transferred employee loses effectiveness, and it should promote training so the employee can adapt quickly and smoothly to the new role, offering all kinds of courses, whether in person, by distance learning or online, with the aim of giving the employee the professional skills the new position requires.
Featured image: Fumo2022, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
