04.02.09
Thinking Smart
A former client sent me an e-mail recently telling me that her newspaper is moving all of its operations to a slightly larger sister paper in the company chain and that she has been offered an opportunity to move. There are open positions that remain at her paper and several more at the sister paper and she’s trying to decide what to do.
At a recent conference, a young woman told me and my fellow panelists that her newspaper had shelved its online unit, which she thought was counterintuitive and she worried that it might be a sign that more layoffs or buyouts were ahead or that her newspaper might be closing.
What neither of these journalists had done was their homework about the company for which they work.
In each of these instances, the company had made a decision to regionalize or centralize its operation. Each of these journalists needed to do her homework and see where the company was putting its resources so she could figure out where and how she could fit in.
Employees can no longer ignore the inner workings at their jobs. When I got my first job I didn’t even think about negotiating a salary. I was offered a position, told what the salary and the benefits were for the job and I accepted and went to work and it went that way through several positions before I thought I was in a position to negotiate. Most people know how to cut a deal to get in the door, but they don’t know how to work the system to stay inside.
I certainly never thought about how the place operated, how it really made money or what happened outside of my department.
Those days are gone. Employees have to know what their company’s priorities are and which positions feed those goals and whether they are in those positions or have a realistic chance of getting there.
The old saw about working smarter, not harder, has never been more true. It’s not just putting in more hours, producing more of whatever it is you produce that will make employers happy. If you are creating more of something they don’t want, you’re going to end up on the path to nowhere.
In the case of the woman whose newspaper was slowly dismantling the online division, the parent company had decided to centralize its online operations. All of its national and international coverage would come through once source and be distributed to all the newspapers in the chain. The only contribution individual newspapers would make would be local stories from the communities they served. Reporters for the newspaper would continue to write both for the newspaper and the Web site. That cuts out a lot of expense for the corporation. If the young woman wants to stay at the paper, she’s better off staying put and learning some Web skills for the future, in case she decides to leave for an online operation.
My former client is in a similar situation. All the editing for the newspapers in her region will be done by one big editing staff at one site. Trying to remain an editor at her current paper is likely to result in a job loss if she doesn’t move to the larger operation. The opportunities to move up in the editing ranks soon will no longer exist where she works now. She can resist the move and risk soon being out of work or not having a better job to move up to. The move to a new community will be far enough away that she will have to move, but she still will be in driving distance to friends and family.
In a tight economy you have to figure out how to stay employed and how to prepare yourself when the position you want comes along when things get flush again. And they will.
