Crisis management: ur doin it rong

This week the Dell plant in Winston-Salem announced (and I use that term loosely) another round of job cuts. As with last month's round of layoffs, the company refused to say how many jobs were being eliminated.

Let's set aside the appearance that Dell is spacing out its job cuts in order to get around mandatory layoff-reporting procedures. Let's just let slide for a moment the tackiness of letting the mayor read about it the local paper, after he's the one who encouraged the city council to ok the multi-million dollar incentive package Dell got for moving here in the first place. This is still boneheaded on a dozen different levels.

For starters, last month's non-announcement announcement triggered speculation that the company was going to ax hundreds of jobs, when it was actually more like 150. One of the top rules of communicating during a crisis is that, in the absence of "official" information, rumors get printed as fact because the press has nothing else to go on - and the company ends up looking worse in the long run than if they'd just been up front at the start. Moreover, people get pissed because they feel lied to, a feeling that doesn't go away easily or quickly.

It reminds me of the time that the museum where I worked in college laid off me and the other part-time staff for all of January and February because ticket sales dropped off so steeply during those months. That's something that I and the other fairly intelligent staff understood. The problem was that our president (no longer there, thank heaven) informed us of this two days before Christmas. We had no warning - no paychecks socked away or bills prepaid. I hadn't even done any Christmas shopping because I'd been working every weekend for the previous six weeks, the busiest of the year. As you can imagine, all of us felt an immense sense of betrayal, to the point where I still can't think of that president without getting angry at the way he treated us.

But here's the best part. The museum did the exact same thing the next year, but this time, they told us in early October. Nobody got mad, nobody quit in protest, leaving the others shorthanded. But we were able to prepare for two months without a paycheck.

Most people are smart enough to handle the truth, or at least some version of it. If you look at any scandal involving a private company or government official(s) in recent memory, you can trace the controversy back to the fact that the people in charge forgot that it's always the cover-up and almost never the crime that'll get you every time.

I don't work for Dell, but with my city taxes I help support them. When Dell lies or conceals facts from the mayor, they're lying to me, too. I have kind of a problem with that.