Change within a company is mostly affecting jobs whether it be cuts or  a change in strategy and business model in the end some employees might no longer be needed while others need to be recruited. But to keep those you deem important you need to be clear in your communication.

Especially true for highly specialized people like developers.

But also true for product managers and all other professions that you hired not only to get some work done but for your company to gain some knowledge and insights and creativity.

The importance when structural change is about to com is to get these high profile people on board and get their support for whatever you want to decide.

A friend of mine pointed out that our developers are not the Schlecker women. Schlecker being a big chain of drugstores that recently went broke and had to close down eventually. They had to decide about the jobs of thousands so called Schlecker women. It was either the jobs could be saved or the vast majority of the staff will be unemployed. Unfortunately the latter happened.

This analogy demonstrates a crucial difference between those low paid jobs and developer positions and the like.

When a company is about to make a decision that high profile jobs are going to be affected by these people will want to know about what the options are and why the company is going in this or that direction just like the Schlecker staff did. But in contrast to them those high profilers will not stay put when uninformed.

High profilers have other options. If i.e. developers get a sense of unease because they don’t know how their work will be affected they will start to look elsewhere outside the company. Low profilers don’t have that option due to a high unemployment rate.

Developers and the like demand to know how their work will be organized. Not telling them will eventually loose them.

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