Survive Redundancy

With redundancies on the rise due to the global financial crisis, we have already seen mass redundancies across many Australian industries. The Reserve Bank of Australia is predicting that as a result of the economic slowdown, 100,000 people will lose their jobs in the next 12 months – pushing the unemployment rate to five per cent. As of November 2008, unemployment sits at 4.4%. Now is a crucial time to start practising techniques that will increase your chances of keeping your job.

Firstly, as with any goal it is important to know your outcome so that you can work towards it. Make sure that both you and your bosses expectations of your work align.

Be productive! How many hours a week do you waste going for a coffee? Talking to colleagues? Busying yourself with admin? A study conducted in 2005 by Microsoft found that Australian employees are unproductive for 2 out of 5 days a week. Other studies have found that workers are unproductive for 90 days a year due to lack of planning or poor management.
Continue with this behaviour and you are in the firing line for redundancy! Be productive and work for 8 hours a day. Leave 5 minutes earlier and get your coffee on the way to work. Write a to do list for the following day before you leave the night before to stop time wasting in the morning.

Give up the email addiction. When the email alarm goes off, do you quickly jump onto your email screen? You are not alone, the eRoi Email Addiction Survey found that 66% of people read email seven days a week and expect to receive a response the same day. If you are addicted to email you are severely wasting your time. Every time you are distracted, it takes approximately 20 minutes to get back to where you were prior to the distraction. In 2005, a psychiatrist at King’s College in London administered IQ tests to three groups: the first did nothing but perform the IQ test, the second was distracted by e-mail and ringing phones, and the third were stoned on marijuana. Not surprisingly, the first group did better than the other two by an average of 10 points. The e-mailers, on the other hands, did worse than those on marijuana by an average of 6 points!

I challenge you to try these three simple steps over the coming 2 weeks and see how much more praise you get from your manager. If you have any comments, questions or would like more techniques, I'd love to hear from you.