What Happens When You Cut the People but Keep the Work?
A multistate Cyclospora outbreak has put shredded iceberg lettuce, Taco Bell, Taylor Farms and the country’s food-safety systems in the headlines. The FDA connected one outbreak to iceberg lettuce recalled by Taylor Farms’ operation in Mexico and distributed through restaurants, food-service customers and select retail stores across multiple states. The lettuce-related cases are also only part of a larger increase in Cyclospora illnesses being investigated across the country.
We don’t have enough information about Taylor Farms’ internal operations to know what workplace conditions may have contributed to the contamination. What we can see is how workplace conditions may have weakened the system responsible for responding once people started getting sick.
According to the former leader of a specialized CDC laboratory that responds to Cyclospora outbreaks, the team went from 11 people to three following federal workforce cuts. Whether or not that reduction slowed this particular investigation, it raises a basic workplace question: What happens when leaders cut the people but keep the work?
Preventive Work Is Easy to Undervalue
Preventive work has a visibility problem. When it is being done well, there may be no equipment failure, data breach, regulatory penalty, quality crisis or public-health emergency to point to.
The people doing the work may be monitoring information, maintaining systems, inspecting processes and investigating small irregularities before they become large problems. Their work creates stability, but stability does not draw much attention.
Leaders can see the cost of those positions every month. They cannot see a neat list of every problem those employees prevented.
After a while, a stable system can begin to look overstaffed. Someone asks why so many people are needed when everything seems to be working so well, without considering whether everything is working well because those people are there.
Cutting People Does Not Cut the Work
There are legitimate ways to improve efficiency. Organizations can eliminate outdated responsibilities, remove unnecessary steps, simplify processes and use better tools to reduce the time required to complete the work.
But cutting positions does not automatically accomplish any of that.
The cases still need to be investigated. The equipment still needs to be maintained. The information still needs to be reviewed. Customers still need answers, deadlines still exist and leaders still expect the same results.
When the work has not been reduced, automated or redesigned, it usually gets transferred to the people who remain.
Those employees often find a way to make the arrangement work for a while. They take on additional responsibilities, work longer hours and concentrate on whatever is most urgent or visible. Less immediate work gets postponed because there is no longer enough time to do everything.
That temporary compensation can make the staffing decision look successful. The most obvious work continues, the deadlines are mostly met and nothing falls apart right away.
What leaders may not see is the backlog beginning to build, the routine monitoring happening less often or the warning signs no one has time to examine. The organization is still operating, but it has less room to respond when something unexpected happens.
This Is a Shared Capacity Problem
Shared Capacity is one of the six JL³ Performance Levers. It looks at whether people have enough time, staffing and access to resources to produce the outcomes expected of them.
It is not a measure of motivation or commitment. Three experienced and hardworking people cannot automatically produce the same amount of work as eleven people when the volume and complexity of that work have not changed.
When capacity shrinks, choices have to be made. Something will take longer, receive less attention or stop happening altogether.
The problem is that leaders do not always make those choices intentionally. They reduce staffing but leave every responsibility, deadline and expectation in place. The employees left behind are forced to decide what gets done based on whichever demand has become most urgent.
Over time, the organization becomes increasingly reactive. People spend their days dealing with problems that have already become visible, while the work that might prevent the next problem keeps moving down the list.
When delays, errors or missed responsibilities eventually appear, leaders may view them as employee performance problems. They ask why people are not managing their time better, communicating more effectively or showing more initiative.
The employees may be doing everything reasonably possible. The conditions surrounding the work no longer support the results being demanded.
The Savings Show Up Before the Risk
Staffing reductions produce an immediate number. Leaders can calculate the salaries and benefits that will no longer be paid and show the savings in the next budget.
The effect on the work is harder to measure.
The increased risk may not become visible until months later, when a warning sign is missed, a response takes longer, quality begins to slip or an experienced employee decides the workload is no longer sustainable. By then, the organization may treat the failure as a new problem rather than connecting it to the capacity that was removed.
This happens in every kind of workplace.
A company reduces quality-control staffing because defects have been low. It cuts maintenance positions because the equipment has been running without major problems. It eliminates administrative support because managers have managed to keep up.
Training resources are reduced because employees already appear to know their jobs. Compliance positions are cut because the organization has not faced a recent penalty. Customer-service teams shrink because complaint volume seems manageable.
In each case, leaders risk treating the absence of a problem as proof that the preventive work is no longer necessary. They may only discover its value after the organization no longer has enough capacity to provide it.
Strong Employees Can Hide the Problem
One reason these decisions can appear to work is that capable employees compensate for weak conditions.
They reorganize the work, cover open responsibilities and create workarounds. They skip breaks, work outside their normal hours and quietly decide which responsibilities can wait. They protect customers, coworkers and leaders from feeling the full effect of the reduced staffing.
That effort can keep the system moving, but it can also give leaders a false picture of what the system can actually support. The organization begins to treat extraordinary effort as its normal operating capacity.
Eventually, something changes. Demand increases, a crisis occurs, another person leaves or the employees who have been holding everything together decide they cannot continue doing it.
The problem may appear sudden to leadership. It probably was not sudden to the people doing the work.
Efficiency Requires a Plan for the Work
Cutting staff can reduce costs. It only creates efficiency when leaders also reduce, simplify or redesign the work.
Before eliminating positions, leaders should know which responsibilities will stop and which processes will change. They should know what can realistically be automated, who will absorb the remaining work and whether those people have the capacity to take it on.
They should also understand what the affected positions are currently protecting. What problems are these employees preventing? What risks are they monitoring? What knowledge will leave with them? How quickly could the capability be rebuilt if the organization discovers that it still needs it?
Without clear answers, the plan depends on the remaining employees finding a way to keep everything moving.
That is not much of a plan.
Don’t Confuse Stability With Excess Capacity
Preventive work can look expensive because its best results are the failures that never happen. That makes it easy to question during a budget review and difficult to replace during a crisis.
Leaders should be careful about looking at a stable system and assuming it contains excess capacity. The people, knowledge and monitoring built into that system may be what created the stability in the first place.
When preventive work is functioning well, you may not see much evidence of it.
You will often see the evidence after it is gone.