Shared sacrifice Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 1

Shared sacrifice - Essay Example But staff left behind has had to absorb workloads or do without support from which they previously benefited, so unless they had previously been underemployed or were enabled to approach their work in a different, less labor-intensive way, these were definitely cuts. This is no way to approach efficiency savings. Efficiency requires a mindset that focuses on improvement, an emphasis on quality, a genuine concern to do the best for the customer. Cuts come from a manipulation mindset, a style that could be described as command and control. While cuts involve zero-sum thinking, in which it is assumed that there is a game to be played, in which if I win you have to lose (and vice versa), efficiency needs abundance thinking. This takes as its starting point the assumption that if we work together to try to meet all our aims we will probably find a way of doing so, or at least get much closer to it than if we fight. Efficiency needs a good understanding of the processes of providing a service and of the way costs are structured. Cuts just need a change in a budget. Cuts are much easier, but ultimately self-defeating. Efficiency is hard work but yields long-lasting positive results. It is a tragedy that, in my opinion, many politicians and managers in the 1990s could not tell the difference, and that it has led to alienation of clinical professionals in a way that was quite unnecessary. Managing resources, then, requires you to understand processes, understand the way costs change with different levels of activity and understand the dynamics at play between people within the system. It also requires the courage to prompt people of high status to think constructively about changes they can make in the ways they work – not at all an easy thing to do. We will start by looking at what we can learn from the strand of thinking that