More Staff Redundancies Ahead of 2017 Season

[Croftybaby]

Sadly this is Coroperate Culture. It's all about the Key Performance Indicators. If you get your work done too quickly then you just get the sack because there nothing for you to do (unless your a boss). Maybe Port Aventuras slow staff have got the right idea after all

 

[Funcone]

It's possible that some of the work will still be done, either by contractors or zero hour staff, but I suspect a lot of it won't be.

There can be something in using contractors where there's a short spike in workload (e.g. around Scarefest) or for really specialist work, nonetheless contractors, consultants and free lancers normally work out more expensive for the time they put in. They often charge more for each hour to make up for the lack of job security, plus you've got to pay enough to cover the hours of the person working, as well as the profit the agency or contractor's company makes. Contractors often have to pitch for work, so what ever they charge the client has to cover the costs of procuring the job in the first place. Plus you still need management from Alton Tower's end to set the brief, to manage the tender process and to check that the contractors are doing their jobs properly. You can effectively end up with two sets of management. Alton Tower's have their own management for the project to make sure they're happy with what's happening, whilst the contractor will have their own management to make sure they're happy from their end. Roles can get duplicated.

There may be times when a contractor's more efficient for really specialist work where you get an outside expert in a narrow field, or if they're constantly having to make a good impression to get more work they may even work harder. I did read that one of the reasons Disney rides often seem so expensive is because the parks are bound to go through Imagineering, when a tender process might have found an outside provider who could do the work more cheaply. I'm sure we've all worked with people who just seem to coast along doing the minimum they can get away with without facing disciplinary action, but where if they were a contractor they wouldn't get hired again.

But it can also be less efficient. Whereas your own salaried staff may do unpaid overtime, contractors don't always have the same loyalty to the company and may be more likely to work to the clock. While your own staff may help out other teams or departments because they're more interested in the bigger picture and the overall success of the company, contractors are perhaps more likely to focus on their own project and then move on. They say you learn from your mistakes, and with a high turnover in external staff you run the risk of mistakes being forgotten quickly and being repeated.

You can also find that contractors have a vested interested in creating work so they can get future jobs. A contractor won't always recommend the cheapest solution to a problem, while some (but certainly not all) contractors are deliberately bad at sharing information so that it's harder for someone else to carry the work on. In some cases a contractor will pitch relatively low for the initial work as a loss leader to get their foot in the door, and lock the company into an expensive ongoing 'maintenance' contract. You come across this quite a bit in IT.

Whilst there are very good contractors, who work incredibly hard to secure the next job, I suspect that a lot of the time it works out as an expensive way to get the job done, and whilst there are some very good consultants there are a lot of cowboys in the industry. Particularly if their works drying up, and they try to take on work they're not really experienced with to fill their order book. Whilst there will be examples of external companies coming in and getting the job done more cheaply or to a higher standard, I suspect these are outweighed by contractors who charge way over the odds, or do a bum job that needs redoing.

In terms of putting your salaried staff on zero hour contracts and reducing their workload, I don't see that being a long term situation. A lot of the staff will accept the new contract on the basis that it's better than nothing, but without a sudden drop in income and a loss of job security, I expect a lot of them would be looking for other jobs behind the scenes.

We don't know which positions are going, but sadly I suspect a lot of jobs simply won't happen anymore. And if they don't, it's inevitable that the quality of the product will fall. There simply aren't vast armies of back office staff pushing bits of paper around and having meetings without impacting on the guests. It's not like this is the first time that Merlin has done an 'efficiency drive'. If Merlin thought someone was doing a job that was unnecessary, I'm sure they'd have gone already.