President's Message

by Marianne Bays

All of you should have received your copy of the 1996 IPMAAC Conference Brochure by now. The theme of the conference is Innovations and Foundations in Personnel Assessment: Celebrating 20 Years of IPMAAC. That's right, IPMAAC now has two decades of history! I hope that all of you will plan to attend the conference and will encourage your colleagues to register, too. Kristine Smith and her Conference Program Committee and Warren Bobrow and his Conference Host Committee have put together what promises to be a great business and social program for us in Boston. You'll read more about this in other sections of this newsletter. I'm particularly pleased to see the excellent balance between tutorials focused on personnel assessment basics for those newer to our profession, and sessions for more experienced folk on advanced topics and innovations in our business.

On a personal note, I'm in the midst of planning my next career change - an exciting proposition, especially for an organizational consultant at a time where organizations are experiencing such major upheavals. Since several of my friends and colleagues are also currently contemplating career changes (it must be our age), I've spent a lot of time lately musing about contemporary organizational change. I've been thinking about needed change in human resource management practices, issues of quality of work life (I'm still trying to achieve that perfect balance between work and play), and also how I might best position myself to help organizations succeed and further my career.

I know I'm far from alone in my current intellectual focus on organizational change and its impact on employees, employers and human resource management. Among the session proposals accepted for presentation at the next IPMAAC conference are several that reflect a keen awareness of the changing nature of employment and the ever present threat, challenge and fallout from "downsizing". In the last issue of ACN, Chuck Schultz wrote about the dilemma facing assessment professionals who are trying to "do more with less" - trying to maintain professional standards and upgrade the quality of their work while suffering under conditions of seriously lessened resources. He observes that many of us seem to be donating our time to our employers these days; accepting that in today's work atmosphere we need to do more than that for which we are paid. Among the questions he asks us to consider are: "Who benefits from the passion to do more with less? For whom does it improve the quality of life?"

In the private sector, it can be easily argued that the stockholders and senior executive management are the primary beneficiaries. Companies such as Sears and Xerox have seen immediate and significant stock value increases after announcement of major employee layoffs. Senior executives gain greater and more immediate Wall Street approval from downsizing than they could from any other course of action. From a less jaded perspective, there is also room for argument that the private sector downsizings are necessary in order to undo inefficiencies of the past and to protect the remaining employees from even more massive job loss that would result from corporate failure. That is, to argue that companies should streamline and cut costs for the greater long-term good. There's lots of discussion about this these days - some credible (from my perspective) claims of the necessity to reengineer work process and increase organizational effectiveness for the good of all. Sure layoff actions are demoralizing and disruptive initially, this argument goes, but in the long run, we'll have an organization that better meets customer needs, is more stable, and one in which employees can be proud to work.

What about downsizing in the public sector, though? According to a recent NY Times article, 454,000 public service jobs vanished between 1979 and 1993. What's the gain here? Overall, are taxpayers getting improved service? Are personal taxes decreasing as public payrolls shrink? Certainly not, in my experience. As for employees, is there anybody arguing that those who are left behind are in any way better off than they were before downsizing? That doesn't seem to be the case, either. I'm not even sure that agency heads, the equivalent of private sector Senior Executives, are winning political favor from these actions. So what's the motivation?

As some of you know, I'm a strong advocate of process reengineering and total quality management - believing wholeheartedly that both incremental and radical organizational change is warranted to increase the long-term effectiveness of contemporary organizations in both the private and public sectors. I even think that, unpopular as it may be, outsourcing specific work functions formerly performed by an organization can be a beneficial move. And, I believe these things despite the fact that I know that these approaches will and do result in loss of jobs and in major personal upheavals for employees.

What I don't believe in is quick fixes. To a large extent, it's short term thinking that got us in this position in the first place. Cutting the payroll first and then trying to figure out how we can get "more done with less" is just plain dumb. As Chuck Schultz pointed out, it's taking a major toll on us as assessment professionals and human beings. A further point that I think needs to be made, though, is that we as assessment professionals cannot afford to continue to "do the same old thing" given the amount of organizational and social change we are facing. (That's what we call organizational neurosis - doing the same thing that we've always done and, yet, somehow expecting that this time it'll actually work.) Yes, we need to educate our clients - sell our craft and its value to our organizations. But we've been saying that for years and I'm unconvinced that it'll be much help in facing and coping with the organizational uncertainty that now surrounds us.

The thing is, I don't think this is such a temporary situation. Instead, I believe that we've entered a new employment era - one in which uncertainty is a certainty, if you will, at least for the foreseeable future. Organizations, jobs and job responsibilities are changing at a rapid and unceasing pace both because of "planned" (I use that term very loosely) management change and due to economic and technological pressures. While our abhorrence of the damage that this change can and will do to individuals may be reasonable, the only practical recourse that I see is for assessment professionals to join (instead of fight) the change management team.

I'm not suggesting turning our back on our professional standards and values. What I am suggesting is that to maintain our professionalism, we will need to change with the times, too. We need to find better ways to do our work - ways in which we can utilize our talents and knowledge in our changing organizations. Ways in which we can continue to assist our employers in meeting their social, regulatory and business objectives through development and use of effective assessment procedures for jobs and organizational structures that aren't standing still. To do this, we need to be squarely involved in planning organizational change and the upfront consideration of impact on jobs and assessment process. Neither we nor our organizations can afford to have us just stand on the sidelines groaning at the mess that's being made. And, neither we nor our organizations can succeed if all we do is continue to try to simply "make do with less".

So, that's my rant for the day. I'll be interested in hearing what you all think. And, even if you're not interested in hearing more debate on this subject, please plan to come to our 20^th Annual Conference in June of this year in Boston. There's lots and lots of different topics covered on the agenda that I'm sure you will find worthwhile, and entertaining things planned for us to do in Boston in the evenings, as well.

Hope to see you there!