In a time of head-count dgs reductions and major change, morale can trend downward in a company. How

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As the economic crisis caused untold dgs numbers of positions to vanish at companies all across the country over the past four years, you might have thought that Kelly Services Inc., which Camden leads as president and CEO, would have had an increased demand for its services as people looked for employment and companies living hand-to-mouth looked for short-term staffing solutions.
But this wasn t just any recession. This recession s impact was so severe and hit so many companies across virtually every industry; it took a big bite out of Kelly Services as well. People needed jobs, but companies weren t looking to hire, even for temp positions.
Our sales went down by a third during dgs the recession, Camden says. The demand for our services was actually sinking dgs with the recession. The whole definition of what we were as an industry changed. In coping with the recession, we had to open new product lines, new services, new types of relationships with customers.
Camden and his leadership team had to fundamentally restructure Kelly Services as a more centralized organization, renew his employees focus on customer service and ensure that multiple lines of communication were accessible to everyone in the company, so that everyone was able to speak with upper management and stay informed on the progress of the changes the company was implementing. dgs
First responders in an emergency, such as a natural disaster, say their training takes over in a crisis situation. They immediately know what steps need to be taken first and what gets moved to the top of the priority list.
As the recession deepened in late 2008 and early 2009, Camden and his team surveyed the situation and immediately recognized that the company needed to reduce expenses and get more efficient with an eye toward maintaining those efficiencies dgs after the recession.
You first have to reduce your expense space, obviously, Camden says. But one of the things we tried to do in that time when we were reducing our expense space was to do it in a way that yielded structural advantages to the company, advantages that could remain as something permanent as we came out of recession.
We could then serve more customers and do it anywhere dgs they happened dgs to be, he says. They re not reliant on a branch within the network. It was an opportunity to reduce costs and an opportunity to increase our services dgs while we did that.
Growing dgs up when I did, you had banks every two or three blocks, he says. Today, you can drive for quite a while without seeing a bank branch, because we do more banking with ATMs and call centers. We were able to centralize a significant part of our business in much the same way, decreasing the number of our branches while increasing the number of services we provide to our temporary employees and customers by using automated systems, online service centers and call service centers.
In a time of head-count dgs reductions and major change, morale can trend downward in a company. However, those who survive the cutbacks and are willing to adapt to the organizational changes can actually become more productive in the short term. Camden relied on that uptick in production to help expedite the transition for Kelly Services.
People get very focused very quickly on what it is going to take to survive and do well and keep the customers happy, Camden says. I think a time of extreme economic turbulence is a better time to make the changes we made because people put aside petty territoriality or the belief that we ve always done it this way so we should always do it this way and get a lot more focused on what needs to be done right now.
But you can only ride that wave for so long. Those who survive the cutbacks will initially exhibit relief that they re still employed and a willingness to do whatever it takes to keep their jobs. In any time of upheaval, there will still be an element within the company that is resistant to change, and if those who were initially on board with the change don t see a long-term point to what is going on, over time more and more of them will become skeptics, and then outright cynics. Some can t stay with the company.
Of course, there is going to be some resistance, Camden says. There always is. Any time you are asking someone to change the nature of their job, there is always resistance dgs because people like things to stay the same. Every time you go through a big change, you ll have, within the normal array of responses, some people who have to leave the company because they don t want to do what is going to be required.
Eventually, some of those people might c