As business slows down everywhere and we have more time to brood, frustrations will build at imagined or real inefficiencies – and at the sometimes remote people at the top who hold our lives in their hands.
The grass will increasingly seem greener in the other field with, of course, little opportunity to hop over the fence because of downsizing and other vile euphamisms for wrecking the security of families needed to compensate for the naked and unregulated greed of the evil bankers.
So there will be time to dream of the perfect company (life can look very different on the inside of these compared with the public images that they portray, again of course).
One such dream employer could be Virgin Blue, if a recent interview with their chief executive officer, Brett Godfrey, in the Australian Financial Review magazine is anything to go by.
Unfortunately, I can’t give you a free link to the article because it’s behind a subscriber wall and I doubt very much whether my boss would sign-off the Aus$1,038 annual fee in the current financial circumstances.
But here are a few highlights from a hard copy of the magazine I found abandoned an a seat in Perth airport (yes, in these straitened times why pay for newspapers and magazines?)
“As a result of the JP Morgan furore (a highly critical and inaccurate analysts’ report), Godfrey pencilled in his diary a series of 30 roadshows designed to reassure staff about the future. Over the past four months, with chief operations officer Andrew David in tow, he talked to 1600 of the company’s 5000 staff in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Auckland and Christchurch.”
And even better, continues the author of the article, Fiona Carruthers: “Employees are guaranteed a response to their bright ideas within seven days, unless he is travelling” (a note from an anonymous reader of my blog to his business-division director: “Dear….I sent you an email three years ago with some restructuring ideas and I am still waiting for an acknowledgement. Happy to see that some of those ideas have been successfully implemented by a colleague, though, who as you know has been subsequently promoted. But I’m not bitter about this.” His redundancy cheque is in the post)
Godfrey, rather than laying new staff off, also sent them on a free holiday paid for by Virgin (although this was unpaid leave) when a strike at Boeing delayed a new service.
This is the stuff that dreams are made of…..