CRA Inc

No Wonder They’re Called Deadlines

For some time now we’ve been coaching internal communication professionals to renegotiate the traditional “deliverables and deadlines” framework into something more strategic and more fulfilling.

Today we have yet another good reason to do so: Deadlines raise heart attack risk six fold.

So tell your CEO: Not only is your being a trusted advisor more satisfying … it’s good for you, too.

The Dehumanized Employee

CIO magazine’s The Dehumanized Employee notes that modern information technology allows increasingly distant managers to make decisions that affect employees’ day-to-day lives:

Where workers in Taylor’s time at least knew the managers who profoundly affected their lives, employees in large organizations today often have no human connection to managers who exert enormous control over them. A century ago it was unusual for corporate headquarters to make a decision that affected employees’ daily lives. It took a big decision with big consequences—the decision, say, to open or close a factory. Workers’ routine operations within the factory were still controlled by immediate, highly visible supervisors.

But in our time, employees are often affected not just by epochal decisions in the life of a company but by routine daily decisions made at headquarters located in another state or even another country. At Wal-Mart and other large retailers, for example, the pressure under which employees work depends not just on their immediate supervisors but on centralized decisions emanating from computerized headquarters that tell local managers how many (or rather, how few) person hours they are expected to use that week.

Even at the level of what in Taylor’s time would have been called the “shop floor,” IT can separate frontline supervisors from employees and make it easier to manage harshly.

Under such a system, employees may feel increasingly invisible and powerless.