Re-deployments and Resignations

After blacking out any hint of this action for more than a month, I can finally blog about it. I spent this whole week in India to tell my team the bad news. The operations had to be dissolved and some of them, if lucky, would be re-deployed. Those who cannot find such opportunities were asked to resign. Terminating them would have put a stigma into their employment history.

I started the Monday by a briefing by India HR on the steps I should follow in the whole process. They highlighted the expected issues that might arise in such situations and finally, I was ready to face the team. I have 6 people in Gurgaon and 3 more in Bangalore. The 3 in Bangalore called in to teleconference for the meeting.

After providing the team with the background on the decision made, they were informed that 7 of the 9 would have to be re-deployed or resign by the end of the month. There just wasn't any work for them! I had laid the groundwork for possible re-deployment by contacting several other teams in India who may have employment opportunities a few weeks before my planned visit to India.

I had never seen my team displayed such a serious look in the year that I had hired and managed them. The 2 seniors who remained were taken aback as no one had any inkling this was coming. I arranged to have lunch with the team in Gurgaon and I could see that they were slowly coming to accept the reality of the situation. I was glad that the worst case scenario that HR had presented me did not materialize.

By Friday, 2 of the team members submitted their resignation letters which would be effective 31st march 2009. I expect that I will need to ask for the resignation letters of 2 more by 31st March.

The light at the end of the tunnel shone on at least 2 team members who managed to get re-deployed into Gurgaon and Bangalore based teams respectively.

This has been the hardest task that I ever had to do in my career in the company (and this had spanned almost 28 years)!.

I had time to reflect on the team members and for some of them, I have an image burned into my memory of the idiosyncracies of that individual. Just like when I did my MBA, I will always remember one buddy as the one who actually thought that CUT and PASTE meant just that - literally. We did a marketing paper together with 2 other coursemates and as I did the final review, I told the group, that the flow of the report would be better if we cut certain sections and pasted in in a different order. My friend thought we had to print the report as is, cut the sections indicated and repaste it in the order suggest.

I have another currrent colleague who is from a different state. Early on, after she had just joined the department, she asked to be dropped off at Ikano Power Center. I took her there and found out that she just wanted to get to the post office there. I told her that there was a post office that was just a couple of street from her residence. Till today, I can still egg her on this.

And in the team in Gurgaon, one of the employees actually offered to pay me to hire him one year ago. I should have taken his offer, saved the company some money and make some for myself then. Darn!! Wasted opportunity.

Last but not least, I want to share with you an image of how most of these employees would have looked like if I had managed to capture their response on camera.