The Ford Ultimatum: Car maker gives 'underperforming' white collar staff choice between severance or six-week enhancement plan amid $3 BILLION cuts

[dtech]

FWIW, In my 45+ year engineering career with some of the biggest companies in the world one common thread was a ranking system for the employees. Your manager would rank his/her employees 1 to x and then the managers would get together and merge their rankings into one overall ranking of 1 to x (same thing happened with the managers). Normally this overall ranking would be used to hand out raises and promotions but it would also be used to weed out consistent low performers.

General Electric was the worst company I worked for and only lasted 3 years before quitting. Besides the ranking system they loved to load you up with "streach goals" and measure your performance against the streach goals. The better you did the more "streach goals" you got until you weren't successful on any of them. You could have come on board at GE and be a top performer and continuously worked at the same level and within 5 years be a bottom performer. Every year all the bottom performers were put on a performance improvement plan. If you were successful you kept your job otherwise out the door you went. The pressure was so intense that folks had nervous break downs or got sick. To top it off they had an attitude that the company was such a great place to work they did not need to pay as much. Once I realized what they were doing to the employees I left for another job that paid significantly more.

Spent some years working for a company based in your state - DEC, at their height employed 120k WW, founder and CEO Ken Olsen didn't believe in workforce reduction and refused to even when company was losing billions, that and his refusal to embrace PCs led to DEC's demise. Companies have to change with the times especially if they are in highly competitive industries such as autos, Farley is making the moves he feels are necessary, time will tell if his strategy is successful. There are always victims and bad decisions around who goes and who stays, that's just the nature of the beast. I was denied being let go from DEC because of good performance but I found a high placed supporter and got my wish, the arguement made was other people want to stay here, I don't, in the big picture it didn't matter DEC was beyond salvageable. Was a great company to work for in it's heyday though.

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[Dgc333]

Spent some years working for a company based in your state - DEC, at their height employed 120k WW, founder and CEO Ken Olsen didn't believe in workforce reduction and refused to even when company was losing billions, that and his refusal to embrace PCs led to DEC's demise. Companies have to change with the times especially if they are in highly competitive industries such as autos, Farley is making the moves he feels are necessary, time will tell if his strategy is successful. There are always victims and bad decisions around who goes and who stays, that's just the nature of the beast. I was denied being let go from DEC because of good performance but I found a high placed supporter and got my wish, the arguement made was other people want to stay here, I don't, in the big picture it didn't matter DEC was beyond salvageable. Was a great company to work for in it's heyday though.

At the same time I was working for Motorola when they employed 150k WW. At that time the grandson of the Motorola founder was CEO and had believed that the employees were the companies most valuable asset and as such he had to approve the release of anyone with more than 10 years service. As a result anytime there was a reduction in force it was always the folks with less than 10 years regardless of performance which resulted in an abundance of low performers with 10+ years. On the plus side the company gave you all kinds of opportunity to improve your skills with in house training (they even had an accredited in house university) as well as external education and training.

All of the big technology companies in Mass (DEC, Data General, Prime, HP, Motorola and Wang) only Motorola and HP still exist. Motorola is a shadow of it's former self.

 

[dtech]

yeah didn't Motorola sell off a lot of it's assets to China ?

 

[Dgc333]

yeah didn't Motorola sell off a lot of it's assets to China ?

It started while I was still there. They sold off most of their IC designs and manufacturing. The high end DSP and ASIC IC business was split off and formed Freescale, at the time they owned about 50% of Freescale, no idea now. They also sold off the military communications business to General Dynamics. They then split the company into two companies; Motorola Solutions, Motorola Mobility. Mobility was the cellphone business which they then sold to Google which later sold to Lenova (a Chinese company). Lenova has the rights to use the Motorola logo and pays licensing fees. Motorola Solutions still does two way radio products and broadband products. They also license the use of the logo to other companies.

FWIW, I get my pension every month from Motorola Solutions.

 

[dtech]

It started while I was still there. They sold off most of their IC designs and manufacturing. The high end DSP and ASIC IC business was split off and formed Freescale, at the time they owned about 50% of Freescale, no idea now. They also sold off the military communications business to General Dynamics. They then split the company into two companies; Motorola Solutions, Motorola Mobility. Mobility was the cellphone business which they then sold to Google which later sold to Lenova (a Chinese company). Lenova has the rights to use the Motorola logo and pays licensing fees. Motorola Solutions still does two way radio products and broadband products. They also license the use of the logo to other companies.

FWIW, I get my pension every month from Motorola Solutions.

good for you on the pension - I pleaded for a severance package from DEC and got it with 9.5 yrs tenure - needed 10 for pension eligibility. But I kept in touch with their storage group where I had worked, it was now Compaq, I accepted a vp position to manage marketing campaigns - was told I would have monies and so on - all bs I was under Compaqs thumb who knew nothing about storage and I would have convince these Houston clowns to give me budget, so I said FU and quit.
3 yrs back got a letter from HP saying I could now collect my pension, somehow they credited me the 9.5 yrs worked and added the time between my return, so HP pension I now collect.

 

[LostMy65]

The downturn in performance by so many employees probably has a lot to do with them working at home in their pajamas. I think businesses are growing weary of having to coddle employees.

It may and it may not.
But yeah, if we can get people commuting all over again, it can't help but benefit the earth.

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