John Linton I read the report that Telstra was in the process of again revising its operational management structures with the objective of reducing the number of 'senior' managers employed in their business. The article I read was here:
http://www.itwire.com/it-industry-news/strategy/40554-telstra-cutting-dead-management-wood
but it seemed to me to be self contradictory in that it described as "senior managers earning in excess of six figures" which seems a very low 'senior management' salary to me. I would have no idea where the very precise number of "330" people possibly using their jobs as it would either mean that a decision has already been made or it is just a number plucked out of the air by someone or other. Whether any particular number, 330 or otherwise, is meaningful would depend on the actual number of 'senior managers' employed by Telstra before any reductions were/are made.
You would have to assume that Telstra will be reducing both the number of employees and therefore the number of managers if it proceeds to sell off its network infrastructure to the government 'NBN2' over the coming years but that wouldn't have an effect either now or in the near future. So why would any company reduce its personnel generally and its 'senior management' in particular? There only appears to be one possible reason - gross feather bedding built up over the years despite El Sol's best efforts to reduce Telstra personnel while he resided in Australia.....or what it really means is that Telstra had a pretty bad year and before they publish the FY 2010 results they are going to have to appear to have addressed some of the issues....perhaps that's too cynical.....time will tell.
Exetel had a very tough year in FY2010 with our lowest percentage growth of any year we have been in existence - 19.93% (ex gst) compared with an average of 27.71% over the past four years. Unlike Telstra we are not reducing personnel or especially reducing 'senior management' personnel but are increasing our personnel numbers in almost every aspect of our business - not that we actually have many people in total anyway....still just less than 100 in Australia and Sri Lanka. Exetel's current plans for the coming year are based on increasing our number of personnel by around 15% (obviously depending on how each month progresses against our planned targets) with our number of 'managers' increasing by the same percentage.....assuming that the company is able to develop suitable people.
One change to our business that has been brought about over the past 18 months has been the percentage of 'sales' personnel to all other personnel - in both countries. 2 years ago we had 2 'sales' people and didn't even have a sales telephone number or email address for residential services. Since then we have slowly acquired 9 residential sales people (all in Colombo) and 18 corporate sales people in Sydney meaning that we now have 25% of our total personnel devoted to sales activities with that percentage planned to increase to well over 30% by the end of this financial year - assuming we continue to meet our planned revenue targets. A very big change to the 'old' Exetel methods and processes.
It will be interesting to see how the large carriers and providers react to the current situations the different companies will continue to be confronted with over the coming months and next year or so. I very much doubt that it will be only Telstra who begin to realise that they have pursued a mistaken set of directions in personnel acquisition, retention and increased remuneration over the past few, or more, years.
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