The love and hate of money.

I’m back from leave this morning with mixed feelings. I got paid today which put me in a good mood (I get paid monthly so its a bigger deal). I’m not usually a rollercoaster of emotion, but I find myself both loving and hating the place that I’m contracted to work today. On the one hand I returned to find voicemail messages from the managing partner (sent firmwide), expressing the fact that they we’re moved by the tragedy that had struck Victoria in the form of the bushfires.

More importantly promising money from the firm and exhorting partners and employees alike to contribute to the appeal. I felt moved. I know that there is a certain amount of publicity in giving and responding like that to the bush fires, but in real terms they’ll be unlikely to rate a mention on the news. There has been a flood of support for the bushfire victims (as there should be), and the firm responding to that need is touching. Indeed one of their Victorian employees died in the firestorm that has engulfed Victoria, so it is personal on another level for the managing partner who spent time talking to the mother of the employee.

What I don’t understand is how they can be so caring on one hand, and so callous on the other. It wasn’t long after I got in that I spoke to my project manager, to catch up on everything that’s happened while I was away, and discovered that an Executive Assistant had been made redundant. It would not have touched me so much had she not been involved with the project.

To be fair the person that she was working for had relocated to Hong Kong? as part of a strategy where he was to play a bigger role in the Far East as well as being the CIO for Oceania. So her role may well have been redundant considering her boss was no longer close. The question I have though is *so what*. People != Roles, you can make a role redundant, but does that mean that you need to kick the person out the door? No.

Sure there are times when employees need to be let go, if they’re not performing for instance. Truthfully though, there is no reason that the employee in question couldn’t have been moved sideways. I think, I believe from the brief time I spent working with her, that she was competent. She was certainly pleasant to work with, and had a wealth of knowledge. So why let her go? The firm is tightening its belt with the financial crisis being in full swing, an understandable descision even though its more proactive than reactive action.

Truth time; at a certain level businesses don’t care about people. The actions inside the business speak truer than the public actions that the business takes. You can give all the money you want to people that are suffering, but when your employees become nothing more than numbers, and what you do is about making money and nothing else then you’ve lost your way. Money is great, money is neccessary, but its the people and relationships that count. The dynamics of the people I’m working with at the moment have changed, and not necessarily for the better.

I feel slightly dirty for being so happy about my pay.  I’m not happy to be dependent on it. In some ways the company that I work for is better than the business that I’m contracted to. It’s smaller, they haven’t fired anyone, or let anyone go since I’ve been there. I need to remember that while I know the name of everyone that works at my company, they’re still in the business of making money first.

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