The Conservatives have come out today with Cooperatives as the new way forwards for the Public Sector and even the private sector. The idea being that if a body of staff (say a school) work together to make the school more efficient and therefore cheaper to run, they will get a share of the spoils.
I am sure that what they are saying in other words “Get rid of the slack staff and work a bit harder and you can get some cash”. I.e. the public sector put up with crap workers a lot because they feel that working in the public sector is a career for life and not as cutting edge and they wont go bankrupt. I have witnessed this first hand, through my work at Couraud, I saw how the Foreign and Commonwealth office was equipped to deal with this.
I therefore think this is a good plan, in principle.
My thoughts about this have now turned to whether the model would work on a development project. It is something I have been at the start of a few times. The truth of those start-ups though were that the initiators had a stake but after that, there was no provision for new staff to have a cut. Also I have come on board a few projects on the payroll, been interested in the work, but as I am not a shareholder I have not been as committed. My work at Couraud could be characterised by that.
I would love there to be a model to make this work. How would you bring in people 6 months in, what would be there share, what if you needed an injection of cash, how would you get agreement. Also, probably more practically, who would be in charge and how would you handle dreadful managers that the rest of the staff wanted to get rid of.
I can see the model of Professional Partnerships, such as law firms, being a possible model. My experience of those though is that they are as flexible as me after a half marathon (not a picture of young bunny rabbits racing about the fields). A development project needs to be extremely flexible, look at some of the problems that people are now perceiving of Microsoft, although I am not all that sure they have big problems.
This is something I am going to keep my eye on and have some more thoughts, I would love to get involved in a project like this, if I get my say and cash and recognition and I can work from home and people don’t go off sick too much and etc. etc.
