Delivering Unplesant News to Employees

Delivering Unpleasant News to Employees

Introduction

The interviewee's company was bought by another larger company that is a big West Company. The management main aim of doing this was to buffer and mitigate the effect of this acquisition from their billable employees as much as they could. After a period of twelve months or so into this acquisition, a PowerPoint was sent to the management to use for their ten Texas offices in the formulation and implementation of the health insurance premium rises. The management was quite concerned over how their employees were going to receive this new development in as much as all other companies and business firms all over the United States had been forced to increase their health insurance premiums. Besides, there were strong legitimate reasons and explanations that backed up this novel decision.

A thorough review of the PowerPoint was done and the interviewee , together with a couple of other colleagues decided to consult their Corporate Human Resource department asking for more individual illustration s of the real costs for a Physician's visit were in Texas city. The main aim and driving force behind this move was to show that every single dollar that a staff member or even a member of his or her family spent on a doctor's visit was catered for by the company, which at the end of it all was being paid for by their own employees. This is because the company is self-insures and is owned by the employees. By so doing, the management was able to incorporate some real examples of a physician's visit costing one hundred dollars, with the employee having to give only the twenty dollar co-pay, with the company itself meeting the eighty dollar balance, as opposed to some other large insurance company.

The financial or economic impact of going to a hospital's emergency room just from routine care was shown, versus going to a physician's office for consultation. The employees through the management were educated on the advantages of making use of the ninety-day prescription by mail order system which was seen to enable both the employees and the company to cut on costs instead of filling of recurring prescriptions on a monthly basis (Bennis, 2009).

The Main Problem

In a nut shell, this would have been quite a big deal with the possibility of the issue causing the company's employees to develop negative unwanted feelings towards the new acquisition of our company by another. If an anticipation of the staff members reactions had not been done as well as the gathering of useful data and information including detailed examples of why and how the health premium increases were both necessary and justified, the result would certainly have been quite disastrous as well as undesirable. The interview in collaboration with managerial colleague had to also show their employees their comparison of rate increases in other business organizations and companies that held a much higher position in the market who were also seen to be rolling out as well.

This however was not enough as far as they were concerned, the management had to provide them with information and advice on the proactive things that the members of staff could do, in an attempt to cut costs for the sole reason of minimizing or better still eliminating future rate increases that were likely to occur. The administration had a strong desire to ensure that their employees understood the power they possessed by virtue of working for a company that was employee-owned. They also needed the staff members to realize that from a personal perspective, they could actually aid direct and steer the company towards financial success and achievement by making well informed and certainly better decisions and choices regarding health care (Bennis, 2009).

Because the interviewee felt that they, that is the company's management team were more in touch with the likely reactions of their employees towards the health premium increases, they took the canned PowerPoint program and in collaboration with the Human Resource department, made improvements on it and beefed it up so as to highlight and center on personal examples and points that would help the whole program hit closer home as well as give a justification for this increase.

The personalization of examples made the whole issue real to the employees and they were thus able to see for themselves why these increases were inevitable. It would have been more difficult for them to comprehend the situation if they were just informed about was bound to happen without any logical as well as adequate explanations for the situation. The staff was seen to immensely appreciate the issue better and accepted it as genuinely