Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Questions on Brightsizing

1. What is downsizing?


Ans:      An organisational strategy that involves reducing the size of the workforce is known as downsizing

2. What is bright sizing

Ans:      An organisational strategy that involves reducing the size of the workforce based on the criteria of age, ie most recently joined workforces is removed is known as brightsizing. The most vibrant young technologically savvy people are asked to move out of the company in the scenario of a brightsizing.

Brightsizing, is a type of corporate downsizing in which the brightest workers are let go. This happens when a company lays off those workers with the least seniority, but its those young workers who are often the best trained and educated.

3. How is bright sizing a statistical error.

Ans:      In statistical terms, bright sizing is Type 1 Error, ie the error of rejecting a null hypothesis when it is actually true. Here the truth is that young vibrant crowd forms a major contributor to a companies performance but unknowingly the company is removing the young crowd thinking that they are doing the correct sizing.

4. What is the phenomenon of bright sizing called in literary terms?

Ans:      In literary, the phenomenon of using fancy word to express a negative conatation is known as a “Euphenims”.

5. When does bright sizing happen

Ans:      Bright sizing can happen is 2 situations

1. Where the union or trade organization are very strong: Here the senior people have a strong say in the working of the company and when a downsizing has to happen, the seniors tries to maintain their position safe and young vibrant people are asked to move out.

2. Huge layoffs: If the company doesn’t have enough time and cost to do a proper performance or value based evaluation of employees before a layoff, the company chooses a most starigt forward method of laying off the most recently joined employyes thinking that they have very less acquired knowledge/training from the industry. This typically happens for a company which has to lay off more than 40-50% of their staff.

6. What are the different methodologies used for sizing

Ans:      Sizing is a major activity used in human resource planning. The main methodologies used for sizing of human capital are 1. Man power planning 2. Human resource accounting and thirdly Balance score card method and goal/task based evaluation.

7. What is manpower planning?

Ans:      Man power planning is the methodology used in a company to identify the required man power strength for a typical job.

8. How is man power planning done in consulting?
Ans:      In consulting companies we identify the gamut of works/services the company is into. We divide the services into smaller line of services and divide the man power requirements into 3-4 divisions like people required in front office, people at middle layer, people required at high level etc. We understand the skill set required for each level in each service lines and then map the existing manpower to the following list of manpower required based on “Matching Skill set” criteria.

9. Which type of industry uses task/goal based evaluation methodology?

Ans:      The performance evaluation is the method normally used in IT/ITES companies.

10. What are the methodologies used for performance evaluation?
11. Explain task based performance evaluation
12. What are the after effects of brightsizing in an organization?


13. What are the after effects of brightsizing on employees?


14. What are the alternatives for brightsizing