New P3 Model to Get Rid of Corporate Dead Wood

RMN Digital | October 9, 2014 | Corporate, Editorial, Opinion, Strategy | No Comments

In the new phase of corporate restructuring, companies must identify and employ only those people whose work is directly useful and could be measured empirically. The others must be shown the door.

By Rakesh Raman

Rakesh Raman

Today’s knowledge-driven development programs in any economy are supposed to bring overall prosperity for the people at large. But in reality, almost all the countries of the world are facing persisting economic slowdown.

As a result, people in different parts of the world are facing severe economic hardships and joblessness resulting in internal conflicts and protests against the local governments.

This is happening because of a strange knowledge paradox. While the workforce in the knowledge economy is supposed to be knowledgeable, most workers are naïve, unskilled, and incompetent.

The corporate world has introduced downsizing and rightsizing schemes to get rid of the corporate dead wood – or the unproductive workforce. But the persisting recession in the world shows that these schemes have failed to deliver desired results.

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In the new phase of corporate restructuring, companies must identify and employ only those people whose work is directly useful and could be measured empirically. The others must be shown the door.

To achieve this restructuring, I have developed a qualitative model and named it as “Productive People Prognosis or P3” to help companies use their manpower resources optimally, conserve manpower costs, and get more competitive in the cutthroat marketplace.

Under Productive People Prognosis or P3 model, I have categorized the total workforce in a company in four different categories: Workers, Corporate Parasites, Corporate Zombies, Corporate Vampires.

Although the names of these categories may sound a little comical, they are supposed to explain the traits of employees in each category lucidly.

Let’s discuss the role of these categories of employees and decide about their relevance in a company.

1. Workers

These are mostly blue-collar workers who work hard during their entire work shifts and whose work is visible to all in the company. Examples of such workers are laborers in construction projects, machine operators in manufacturing plants, and so on.

They can even be white-collar workers in an office setup. Examples of such workers are computer programmers in tech companies, artists in design firms, technicians, and so on.

As they deliver tangible output, you can measure their work while paying them for their contribution to the company. But unfortunately corporates don’t treat such workers respectfully and they fall in the lower brackets in a company’s hierarchy. Actually, they should be kept at the top because they are indispensable for corporate growth.

Therefore, we can conclude that it will not be possible to run a company without workers and we cannot lay them off.

2. Corporate Parasites

Employees in this category survive and thrive in a company by using dirty tricks and manipulations. They would show that they are the most important part of the company and would take credit for the work that is done by others.

A normal worker becomes a corporate parasite after spending about 3 – 5 years in a company. After this period, their tangible output in the company either becomes nil or it starts showing signs of attenuation.

As such employees do not want to work, they kill their regular office time in unproductive chores such as using mobile phones for gossiping, wasting time on Facebook games, repeatedly going to the loo, or loitering all over the office without any purpose.

As a rule of thumb, nearly 75% of employees who have spent 3 – 5 years in the company are corporate parasites. Companies must identify such employees and ask them to leave.

3. Corporate Zombies

While most of such employees are among the senior management in the company, they prefer to spend their office time in utterly useless meetings with the internal staff or external vendors.

Corporate zombies attend office simply to kill their own as well as others’ time. Since they don’t possess any hard skills that are useful for the company, they spend their time in frivolous general management tasks such as cleanliness in the office, birthday celebrations of employees, and meaningless phone conversations.

Since most companies don’t have proper performance measurement systems in place, they fail to identify such employees. But with a careful monitoring, companies can quickly find out such employees and ask them to resign.

4. Corporate Vampires

This is the most dangerous category of employees. By taking ad hoc and wrong decisions, they work against the interests of the company. Like corporate zombies, corporate vampires also don’t possess any useful skills required to run a modern enterprise.

As corporate vampires lack even basic communication skills, they can’t write even e-mails correctly. If you check their e-mails, each mail will have at least one error in each sentence. As a result, their instructions to others are not clear. How can you expect such inefficient employees to work for the corporate growth?

Companies lose plenty of money because of corporate vampires’ inefficient way of working. But they are not able to catch and remove them.

The Productive People Prognosis or P3 model is specially designed to help such companies identify the dead wood and throw that out.

While the top company stakeholders such as directors or owners are supposed to use the P3 model, it’s believed that this model can help them save nearly 60% of the manpower costs. Plus, they can achieve higher productivity levels in their companies. Result: They can do more with less. Let’s do it.

By Rakesh Raman, the managing editor of RMN Company

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