Hidden opportunities

A mate of mine told me an interesting story last week which I wanted to share with our readers.

He has been consulting to a biggish firm for about 6 months now and so he has gotten quite a good idea of how the politics and the people in the office environment work. Most of them don't know his role in the business and assume he's largely an administrative type which suits his role just fine.

The 'economic crisis' (as it has been dubbed by the media) has meant that the business involved has had to speed up some of its business process review.

This culminated last week in a meeting with all the staff of the affected departments from across the country at head office.

As you can imagine, there was plenty of chatter about job security, retrenchments etc.

For my mate, one of the interesting things was that he was able to sit in on the meeting and watch the reactions as management discussed some of the changes that would be happening, particularly around HOW people would be working. He said that even though there was never any mention of job cuts or retrenchments, many of the employees in the group were concerned that the new job descriptions and KPA's would be beyond them and they just wanted to go back to the old way of working.

Interestingly he said thjat it wasn't age that decided whether somebody was enthusiastic about adopting change. The oldest guy on the team (and presumably the person most reluctant to adapt to a technology based change), was the most enthusiastic supporter of the idea.

My mate was intrigued and he asked the guy (Call him Mr X) why he had been enthusiastic about seeing the bigger picture and going with the changes.

Mr X said "The majority of these people working here depend on their salary as their only means of income, if you take the comfort factor away, there is

no room for them to see the opportunities that this presents. Not one of them picked up that the company is paying for them to receive international training that almost no other South African has received - instead they are worried about a pay cheque."

He went on to say "for me I've been in this industry for 37 years and have slowly but steadily built up some sideline sources of income so I am not wholly dependant on my salary to pay the bills."

The above proves that for many people, money does make the world go round. That single pay cheque that most people rely on is there sole motivation - if they stopped focusing on that for a moment and saw the opportunity to receive R20 000 worth of training that they would probably not have received otherwise.

Interesting way to look at things....