#2 Survival as a company – learning from 2008

Categories:
Uncategorized

2. Flexible Workforce. The classic Anglo-Saxon approach in a crisis is to lay off employees very early and very quickly. The typical Central European solution is to retain at least the core team and the essentially important competence and knowledge carriers. This allows the company to get off to a faster start after the crisis and the economic loss of the whole economy is smaler.

However, more flexibility is still needed. For example, the IT company of an acquaintance went bankrupt because its three main customers had postponed or reduced orders within a short period of time. Since he had many permanently employed software developers, these costs led very quickly to the end.

In contrast, one of our customers had 30 of his own developers and 15 flexible remote developers from us, and when his main customer froze all orders, this customer did not go bankrupt, because he was able to terminate our developers quickly.

This was not nice for us :-), but our client could at least continue.