Author丨Jing Xing
Editor丨Tangerine
On Saturday, after the brother of the headquarters of a fast-moving consumer goods company braved the rain to go to the market, he sighed: the salary is 2000, and the first day off is one day off, saying that the FMCG people are cattle and horses, and the cattle and horses are not necessarily happy, at least when the cattle and horses rain, the owner will also let the cattle and horses stay in the built shed, for fear that the cattle and horses will be sick.
The above paragraph is a complaint and a complaint, but behind this, what we see is the current survival status of FMCG people. The way of working of "six days off and one day off" is moving from the regional volume to the headquarters - usually a regular FMCG enterprise with a point of scale, and the sales abroad are all six days of work, and the headquarters is still a five-day work system. But now, more and more formal FMCG companies are also involved in the six-day work week. Of course, the salary of 2000 is a bit exaggerated, it represents more that after the performance is difficult to complete, everyone can only get the basic basic salary.
The paradox is that the performance is still not completed despite the fact that the working hours are longer per week, is it the wrong goal, or the employees are not working hard?
"Volume" does not come out of the performance
"I have been doing FMCG for more than ten years, and I finally experience the happiness of weekends."
Ten years of FMCG elderly, Ah Wen recently went to Lay's as a sales director. In the past year, he has two of the biggest takeaways.
One is that the day you work more will not help your performance at all. Before going to Lay's, he did daily chemicals, grain and oil, and basically the reality of these categories in the past two years is that he can't achieve results. Employees don't say that they have six days off and one day off, you work 12 hours a day, seven days a week, and you can't complete the sales performance.
On the contrary, after he joined Le, all statutory holidays should be available, and his performance is still increasing year by year. The area he is responsible for is among the top three in the whole region, with the fastest growth - he believes that the growth of performance is not because he has brought the "diligence" of the previous company to the new company, others work five days, he works six days, just work at a normal pace, the only difference is that he opens more new customers - and these new customers are basically dealers who used to work with him.
That is, the person is still the same person, the customers are still those customers, but the product is changed, and as a result, not only the work is often reduced, but the performance and salary are also increased.
Second, FMCG companies are really talented in the matter of "volume". A spicy noodle company requires front-line employees to clock in every two hours – not just to punch in, but also to report on what you've been doing in the past two hours. The deviation between the location of your punch and the company's system positioning should not exceed 150 meters, which is the system visit route of the employee on the day. Usually, employees are not good at the eight-hour work system, after all, if you leave work and the leader does not leave work, you still have time than the leader.
But it is such a "meticulous" arrangement, and the performance that cannot be completed is still unfinished. The same is snack food, an employee's five-day work system, the performance is still growing in double digits, an employee reports every two hours, and there is no guarantee of rest on Sunday, and no rest is guaranteed on Saturday, but it still can't achieve KPIs.
Writing here, the author is hesitant, my original meaning is that when the direction, product, and marketing of the enterprise are wrong, you can not toss the performance only by "tossing employees". But when many "high-level" people see this, they will suddenly have a feeling that their eyes are bright: it turns out that there is such an "advanced" strategy that can improve management; I thought I was "enough employees", it turned out that other companies are more ruthless, and they can learn from it. Obviously meant to criticize, but it has become a placebo for some people to toss employees.
Why does it become a "crime" in the eyes of some superiors to let employees rest normally, and the more the leadership rises from below, the more they will come up with some new tricks to "toss employees"?
First, because the achievement of performance is in all aspects, "products, competing products, and weather" are actually very important "three yuan". However, many companies require employees to report that there are "three nos", and they are not allowed to mention product problems, and the company's products do not have any problems, they are all good products, but the employees are not in place, and the process management is not in place, so that the company's products are not competitive in the market; Don't talk about competing products, that is, don't talk about the investment of competing products, the promotion of competing products, etc., these are not the reasons for your poor performance, you have to take a long-term view, competing products are sold for 1 million in you, which proves that your market potential is 1 million, and you have to grab the market of competing products; Don't talk about the weather, everyone who does FMCG knows how much the weather affects sales performance, but you can't mention it. As long as you mention it, you are throwing the pot.
Second, the supervisor who is promoted from the front line knows how many loopholes there are when employees are working. Originally, when I was on the front line, I felt that these loopholes could be exploited and made me more comfortable, but when I was promoted, I felt that these loopholes must be plugged so that employees could devote more time to work. To take the simplest example, we all know that high inventory is very harmful to the enterprise, when they are in the region, they are doing everything possible to "not press the goods", but when they really go to the top and are responsible for the performance, they will always do everything possible to let the following employees press more goods.
Employee "lowest cost"
The main indicators for the completion of KPIs in the enterprise are performance growth and cost reduction. In both of these areas, we say performance growth, and it requires too many elements, and each element requires a lot of spending. We need to produce a new product, we need R & D costs, and we need channel fees to store the market, but even if these are available, this product may not sell well, and we need product recovery costs. You must know that the survival rate of new products of FMCG companies is 5 per 1,000. To build a new product, the cost of trial and error is too high.
On the contrary, let's take a look, if we treat employees "strictly", set a high growth rate for employees, employees can't get KPIs, and accidentally reduce employment costs; For another example, to cancel the welfare of employees, many companies originally had a salary called working years, some were 100 yuan a year, and some were 200 yuan a year, with a cap. Nowadays, the company has canceled this part, and one person saves 1,200 yuan a year, if it is 10,000 employees, it is 12 million, and it is 120 million in ten years.
In addition, the original employees worked eight hours a day, five days a week, and received a salary of 3,000 yuan; Nowadays, employees still get a salary of 3,000 yuan, but they take six days off and one day off, and sometimes float for nine hours, and increase at least 32 hours of working hours this month, is this cost reduced?
As for what you said about working hours like this, the employees are not motivated, grinding foreign workers, and their combat effectiveness is not as good as before. We see that in the past, for the sake of performance, the business was tearing up posters, tearing up flags, drawing large umbrellas, grabbing displays, all the way to the sword, that was really desperate; Today's business is that you take your route, I take my route, help each other, love each other, what is called wolf nature, but they are all workers who can't eat enough, why bother?
Other hidden costs are the ultra-high turnover rate of employees, the unit contribution rate of employees is declining, and new employees need to adapt to a new company, even if they have FMCG experience, which is a cost.
But again, these are invisible, compared to the investment of real money, the invisible cost can be ignored, to put it bluntly, invisible things will not be displayed on the PPT, PPT should be the cost of reduction, performance such a "beautiful" word.
Does the rule-maker need empathy for frontline workers? After all, he has passed the time to be a front-line employee, and he doesn't need to experience these unfavorable factors, all he needs to do is how to face the "higher-level person", explain the assessment project, and then get promoted and raised.
It is under this accumulation that we see that it is becoming more and more difficult for most FMCG companies to complete their performance, the inventory is getting higher and higher, and the new products are getting fewer and fewer. Those roads that were already difficult to follow are now even more nowhere to go. Think about it, which of these best-selling products today is not a product of ten or twenty years ago. Everyone puts their minds on the so-called improving the efficiency of employees, and what they get is inefficient employees and aging products.
I know that the volume is meaningless, but no one will stop. The cost of being "good" to employees may be too high!