Staff Moral on Resizing

Introduction

“Resizing” is one of the most common scenarios for many of today’s companies, especially in Corporate Organization suffering from economical downturn as well as the impact of advanced technology leading to the need of “Resizing”. “Resizing” is one of the corporate strategies in maximizing the profitability and efficiency use of resources. It is also aimed to make strengthen the competitiveness of a company by adjusting the size of the workforce according to its actual needs. “Rightsizing” refer to intentionally reducing the company’s workforce to the point where the number of employees is deemed to be right for the company’s current situation. The result of resizing might lead to low level of morality towards the remaining staff.

Resizing Process

When a company is undertaking organizational restructure (i.e. resizing), there are three stages to deal with the change of structure. It can be defined by the Change Process Theory (Werner and DeSimone, 2006 p.563). Stage 1 – unfreezing which create motivation and readiness to change by presenting the current problem of the organization and to get the staff recognize the need for change. Stage 2 – changing through cognitive restructuring which help individual to feel, see, judge and react to the new structure. Stage 3 – refreezing which help the individual to integrate the new point of view under new structure.

The restructure process of an organization can be last for certain period subject to the scope of changes. Employees should be well informed the reason for change and receiving support from organization to adapt to a new structure. In addition, organization should ensure a smooth transition from the existing structure towards a new structure as to minimize the impact towards staff morality. Therefore, it is a challenging process to an organization on effective human resource management after resizing.

Challenges of Organization Resizing

Human Resource plays an important role in strategic planning together with management and executing the organization resizing. When it is executed, one of the most difficult challenges is to manage the staff who are not impacted. When resizing result in lay off, it often causes poor moral, low motivation and high level of stress due to a rather intensive workload with low number of workforce. The remaining staff may feel guilty for being retained in the company as