an avoidable drama

The recent episode of Jet Airways making an announcement to retrench 1100 employees and the reversal with the chairman stating that “The management will have to understand sometimes in a family there are disagreements but the father of the family decides.” had the weirdness one would normally associate with Ekta Kapoor serials . The drama was entirely avoidable .

Jet did not reach it's current employee numbers overnight . Neither were the recruitments done without the knowledge of Jet . When an organization faces challenging times(due to external factors or a crisis of it's own making) it's necessary to look at all aspects of the business to save costs . And not put people on the chopping block as the first measure . Even if retrenchment / retrenchment on this scale was the only way out there were far more humane ways to go about it .

After this episode Jet can probably add ' rebuild employee trust and morale' to it's to-do list.

One hopes that the Jet episode will be instructive for other companies who may be contemplating similar measures as the first course of action .