Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 23, 1994 TAG: 9411160009
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KIRK JOHNSON THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: RYE, N.Y. LENGTH: Long
Most of the people working there are barely connected with one another. They work for large and small companies elsewhere, or for themselves - merely leasing their offices for a monthly fee. There's a foreign-currency trader for a big Wall Street brokerage house telecommuting in one office, just down the hall from a former IBM executive trying to make it on his own. Free-lance headhunters stalk the halls.
Giffnock's six employees exist in a new realm as well. They work at Giffnock, but all, including the president, George Russell, are employed by another company that provides their benefits and signs their paychecks. They are leased employees.
``All the relationships that we've grown up with, they're all changed,'' Russell said.
Relationships are at the center of any workplace, and for decades the white-collar empires of the New York metropolitan area conferred stability and a certain predictable order on the universe of work. People made careers inside single companies, developed their internal networks and treated office mates as extended family.
But much of that universe is gone, management experts and psychologists say. Downsizing and layoffs have released tens of thousands of highly trained and educated executives onto the landscape, some of whom have alighted at places like Giffnock.
Increasing reliance on temporary employment contracts, employee leasing and outsourcing - where a whole department might be suddenly taken over by a specialized contractor - have further fractured relationships, forcing people to reorganize their lives, make new friends and relate to one another in subtle but fundamentally different ways.
``What's happening now is that people are feeling their way toward a new workplace and a new definition of what the corporation is,'' said Philip Anderson, an associate professor of business administration at Dartmouth College.
``Whether you're downsized or outsourced, whether you're fired or continue to work, it'll be under a completely different relationship - the idea of large numbers of white-collar people working in one corporation, moving up and getting a pension is a phenomenon of the 1950s that is drawing to an end.''
Statistics support the view that businesses are becoming smaller, jobs more fleeting. Even in Manhattan, where large corporations still dominate the employment landscape more than they do in just about any other place in the nation, nearly 38 percent of the work force of 1.9 million in 1988 worked at a company that had 500 or more employees, according to New York state Labor Department figures. By 1993, that percentage had slipped to 33.9 percent.
At the same time, even as hundreds of thousands of jobs were being lost in the region, the numbers of temporary corporate cadres and leased employees were climbing.
At Drake Beam Morin Inc., a Manhattan-based concern that specializes in ``individual and organizational transition,'' displaced white-collar workers are told up front that any job they get, in any company, should not be expected to last longer than three to five years - if they are lucky and they stay on their toes.
``People have got to look at employment as a temporary assignment,'' said Barbara Collins, a senior vice president and managing director at the company. ``If not, they'll get sucked right back into the old paradigm. With companies changing so fast, the person who is going to survive in all this is the one who can change in a heartbeat.''
The transient nature of work in the new office environment has disrupted the way people make and keep friends. On the other hand, if people no longer envision working together for decades, they do not have the same incentives for cutthroat office politics, since a once coveted job, like a manager's, is probably the most tentative now.
Sandy Wells, a consultant in Austin, Texas, said the key to surviving in the fragmented office is to make friends in every job, because chances are you will meet somewhere else.
``It's not really a question of coming up through the ranks anymore,'' she said. ``In a flattened organization, you jump.''
Some companies take over the work of others while shipping out some of their own. Xerox, based in Stamford, Conn., has developed a niche by taking over other companies' mail rooms and print shops: sign the contract, and all your shipping, receiving and internal document production becomes a unit of Xerox.
At the same time, the company has eliminated its telecommunication operation, outsourcing the operation to Electronic Data Systems, a unit of General Motors.
Freeport-McMoRan, a natural resources company in New Orleans, created a new company to handle its communication department and gave all the former department's 21 employees shares of stock in the company that now employs them.
``The boss, for all intents and purposes, who sits behind a 200-pound steel desk with a sledge hammer is dead - and if he's not dead, we're all in trouble,'' said the new company's president, Garland Robinette.
Those experiencing these changes in the workplace voice a mixture of nostalgia, optimism, melancholy and ambition.
``It used to be that if you were with IBM, you'd bank with IBM and have parties with IBM - I don't think that world exists anymore,'' said Douglas Shanks, who works on Long Island for IBM, which has been one of the region's most aggressive companies at trimming its staff and embracing new management and employment forms.
The price of those changes, Shanks said, is greater insecurity and probably some loss of company loyalty. The bittersweet reward is self-knowledge, he said.
``You immediately understand whether you have the right skills for the marketplace,'' he said.
by CNB