Review Of The Article Why Companies Won't Let Bad Projects Die

In many businesses, managers tend to narrow their focus on concepts that would greatly benefit its future but are unable to organize and plan their ideas well and efficiently.

Why Companies Won’t Let Bad Projects Die is an article that revolves around the idea of how organizations tend to overload their employees with tasks which overall lead to disorganization, decrease in employees, and struggle in work performance all due to a lack of strategic human resource planning. The article includes experiences from real companies - found on the Fortune 500 list from Fortune Magazine which ranks the large companies in the U.S. by their revenue - that have dealt with these problems and what they did to overcome the causes of initiative overload. Within this article, they outline a list of possible aspects – impact blindness, multiplier effects, political logrolling, unfunded mandates, band-aid initiatives, cost myopia and initiative inertia - that have led to the downfall in the company and which methods do and do not work when trying to improve these conditions.

Overall, the article discusses many different issues that human resource departments often face. Firstly, the issue of not effectively planning; not forecasting their future human resource needs to attain the company’s objectives. More specifically, what happens when you do not plan ahead for a labor surplus or shortage and how it impacts the company. To add on, they discuss the issue of putting work and the company above the employees by jeopardizing their employees’ health - mentally and physically - by overworking them. Lastly, HR departments face is spending unnecessary money on projects – such as additional training programs - that can be done more efficiently. These issues faced within this article can be solved once companies begin to adequately forecast the future of the business, consider the well-being of employees over work and successfully budget their money towards more beneficial initiatives.

The first prominent issue present in this article is the lack of human resource planning and forecasting the future of the company. One of the leading causes to this problem leads back to how the managers did not notice the build-up of work and how they were blind to the struggle employees experience when having to attend to several different tasks at once. According to Bryson (1988), “in most organizations key decision makers and managers from different levels and functions almost never get together to talk about what is truly important”. This proves that managers tend to focus on how much they wish to get done rather than which need to be done to benefit the business. In the article, they describe this to be similar to the concept of ‘initiative inertia’ – an issue where companies constantly launch tasks for their employees but fail to pause or end the processing of ones that are no longer needed. They did propose several different ideas to fix their failure to plan and possible labor shortage from the result of this, but unfortunately, the majority did not work. For example, the article explains how some companies try to prioritize initiatives based on the different departments. This backfired on them because it resulted in an increase of work for all, but especially managers who did not have a specific department to fall under. According to Smith, Kirkman, Chen, and Lemoine (2018), “employees often rotate back and forth among their many projects during a typical workweek (and even in a single workday), hurting their ability to focus effectively on each project”. Through this, it is evident that a company’s inability to forecast their future slows down their ability to finish tasks quickly or finish them at all. As mentioned in the article, a business-services company called CBIZ, was able to overcome this issue by taking the time to overlook all the initiatives they wished to complete and ask themselves thoroughly which would be beneficial to both the company and the society itself. In their case, not only were they able to organize their ideas and projects well, but they were also able to get them done quicker.

Furthermore, another significant issue found within the article is the issue of how no human resource planning and initiative overload can significantly affect the employees. The article describes how store managers were expected to complete several new tasks on top of many responsibilities they deal with daily. Due to this, employees along the lower tier of the company were given the most work since the managers assign these extra initiatives. To support this, according to Smith, Kirkman, Chen, and Lemoine (2018), “most employees have multiple assignments and projects that they must constantly juggle and prioritize”. This created an overall labor shortage because the demand of work exceeded the current number of employees they have; forcing their workers to become involuntary workaholics. In many organizations, overworking is known to be a cause of health conditions such a depression, anxiety and in extreme cases, death. According to Stoeber and Damian (2016), “workaholism is not a positive characteristic indicating a healthy passion and enthusiasm for one’s work, but an unhealthy characteristic that can have ruinous consequences for an individual’s emotional, social, and physical well-being”. This proves that overworking affects everyone because according to Dessler and Chhinzer (2017), “job stress has serious consequences for both the employee and the organization”. As reported by Dessler and Chhinzer (2017), “employee efficiency has long been considered important to job performance, as it is considered to be a means to achieve organizational goals”. If employees are unable to do their jobs to the best of their abilities due to a lack of sleep, food and a break from work, it would eventually lead to an employee burnout and the company would never grow and reach their goals. Due to all of this extra work, employees tend to quit because of the business’ failure to put employees before the company and the overall strain of putting themselves through a job that only puts them at risk.

On top of that, employees themselves may struggle to find another job and unwillingly become unemployed or have to continue to suffer from the conditions of this job just to have an income to live off of. Regarding the HR department, this is an issue because HR includes dealing with workers’ performance and making sure the workplace is a healthy environment for all. In the end, their inability to help store managers and leaders plan ahead eventually hurt all of their employees despite their efforts to enhance the company through their other tasks such as training. Finally, the article discusses how many companies spend large amounts of money on projects that are unnecessary instead of the essential resources needed to complete these initiatives. In the article, they describe these as connected concepts of ‘unfunded mandates’ and ‘band-aid initiatives’. These concepts combined refer to the idea that company managers tend to focus spending time and money on the little things – such as additional skill support groups – rather than providing the essential resources needed to fulfill greater initiatives that benefit the company’s future. According to Fritzell and Strand (2018), “it could be that people actually realize that if they decide to save the money, they will not be able to spend it, but have difficulties to realize the opposite (if you decide to not spend the money, you can save it)”. By participating in human resource planning and looking at the future of the business, they would be able to budget their time and money efficiently enough to fund valuable initiatives that strengthen the company as a whole.

The issues addressed in this article would overall affect many people – both outside and within the business - in negative ways. This issue may also affect the general public because if many businesses start to experience these problems, they may not want to work in that environment, thus making it harder for many people, especially those graduating from university who are in most need of a job, to find a job. This would also badly affect the business itself because they would have no one to hire when trying to come back from this downfall. Their demand for more employees would take a lot longer to satisfy when businesses look at external sources for new workers.

Lastly, the business would suffer in many budget cuts and a significant number of lost employees thus making it hard to get back on their feet after a falling out. Despite all of this, according to Edmondson (2011), “failures in this category can rightly be considered “good,” because they provide valuable new knowledge that can help an organization leap ahead of the competition and ensure its future growth” (par.10).In conclusion, human resource planning, forecasting a business’ future needs, caring about their employees and budgeting time and money is all essential to their success as a company. From this article, HR departments can learn the significance behind the need to make sure that they have a reasonable number of employees to reach their goals. With this knowledge, HR departments would be able to carefully learn how to keep the needs for the business and their employees as equal as possible – balancing supply and demand. For example, HR departments should be able to strategically forecast what the company’s future may look like and be able to estimate whether they need more employees or not and if they do, determine whether to hire from either external or internal sources. As a result, employees would not have to work endless hours that profoundly affect their health and still be able to work very efficiently.

On top of this, HR departments would be able to learn that organizational budgeting, especially concerning their training programs, would save money that the rest of the company could put towards completing several initiatives. Ultimately, this article could bring attention to the importance of human resource planning to bring great success to the business in the future.