The real estate industry has suffered less from the crisis than the hotel business or the aviation industry, but it has not accelerated like grocery retail. Most companies took a wait-and-see attitude, determined to endure and postpone growth until better times. And some of the entrepreneurs are even thinking about closing their business.
Moreover, the situation cannot be called a crisis. Rather, it is uncertainty in which it is not clear what to do. Close or grow? Expand your sphere of influence or hold on to what is and keep your head down? Lay off employees or hire new ones? What is the most profitable way for the company at the moment?
Layoffs are not an option
The quarantine was marked by two trends. The first is to cut new hires, a logical move in an era of general uncertainty. The second is the waves of layoffs. Companies started cleaning teams to save money and stay afloat for some time.
You can often come across the opinion that, they say, layoffs affected technical personnel and recruiters, who had no one to hire in difficult times. Programmers were left out of work, because it is not easy to find a good specialist on the market. But US official statistics paint a different picture: since March, 117,000 people have been laid off in IT companies, including all types of professions. She is echoed by a poll on Habré, in which all branches of the IT industry fell under the abbreviation in one way or another, except perhaps for game development, telecom and content specialists. Before the crisis, everyone was equal.
Now life is starting to return to normal. But employees who were fired for fear of losing everything cannot be returned. And companies are starting to rebuild hiring, spending time and money searching for new talent.
Uncertainty can mean both decline and sudden growth. In these conditions, it is necessary to be able to react quickly to changes in order not to be left behind. But those who have laid off employees may find themselves in a quandary. They start hiring just anyone, or they take on newcomers, who are wasting energy on the team, failing the OKR plan. The decision to fire part of the team, which seemed simple, ultimately turns into a struggle for existence. Was it really impossible to solve the issue in another way?
How about vacations and salaries?
Forced vacations and cuts in team costs are the next step in the fight against uncertainty. Such solutions seem to be more practical: employees remain in touch, and in the event of a sudden order, they can return to duty. But there are nuances:
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- Cutting salaries is effective if two conditions are met: if it is a personal initiative of the employee, and if even with the cut salary, he will be enough for a living. Sometimes company owners confront everyone with a fact and then wonder why the outflow of personnel began. Also, before making such a decision, find out how competitors cope with it. If no one cuts outside the salary, be sure: sooner or later, employees will find out about this and ask to leave.
If the employees wanted to leave anyway, then why do you need them, you ask. If it is convenient for you to spend every time and energy on training and adapting beginners, then there is no problem with that. If you want the company to operate more efficiently, it is best to leave everyone in their jobs.
Everyone on the bench
Bench can be considered a very distant kind of vacation that developers are usually given. The employee ends the project, there are no other activities, but he continues to go to work and receive a salary in anticipation of a new project. There are times when the developers on the bench have absolutely nothing to do, and they play games for days in front of tired colleagues. But more often they find something to do:
- Engage in technical support for major customers
- Code small projects for a couple of months
- Learn new skills
- Develop internal company projects
- Participate in opensource and hackathons for prestige
- Perform interesting tasks with a low rate
All these activities do not negate the fact that the developer actually brings a loss to the company, receiving a salary and giving nothing in return (or bringing at least in the form of PR). Plus, colleagues on the bench tend to feel like they'll be fired soon, especially if the deadline is too long. Even if you don't intend to do this, the chances that a developer is looking for a replacement for your company are increasing every day. And the sooner you take it up with something, the better.
Where to find tasks for employees on the bench
In chats and social networks
This is the first thing that comes to mind: enter the magic word “Outsourcing” into Yandex / Telegram / Facebook search, etc., register in all kinds of public pages and wait until the customer appears. But, firstly, all these chats are often used for communication, and it can be very difficult and time-consuming to find a project there right away. And secondly, you need to react to offers with lightning speed, otherwise your competitor will overtake you.
Most often, sales people are connected to such channels, who treat chats with disdain and try not to look there. It will be a mistake if you entrust the viewing to an employee on the bench (the author knows a couple of such cases). Without proper experience, he will not be able to respond to offers, and you will lose both an employee who will seem to be a crazy idea, and a channel for receiving orders.
Examples:Web studios and IT developers , IT Outsourcing , chats and publics on the it_outsource telegram , BoardOutsource , a series of private chats from softsource , etc.
On freelance platforms
When companies have orders, sales managers are sent to wander around freelance sites and see what is interesting there. This approach is not entirely correct:
- The company must have a well-designed profile in order to be trusted (and on each platform you need to spend separate time on it).
- Even the selection of proposals will take a lot of time.
- The reaction to a specific order takes quite a lot of time: you need to study the offer itself, collect information about the customer, if possible, and write a worthy answer so that people pay attention to you.
The problem is that freelancing is remembered only when the main sales channels have already sunk. This means additional workload for those team members who are already busy (after all, you can't put developers on a bench for surfing). Considering that projects here are rarely large and well-paid, one has to think about whether it is necessary to storm freelance platforms.
Examples (thousands of them): Freelancehunt.com , Fl.ru , Weblancer.net , Upwork , Freelancer.com , Guru ...
By the way, StackOverflow and GitHub also have subdivisions for finding executors for projects.
On Bench Teams Platforms
There are quite a few companies on the Internet that are ready to help your developers find a new outstaff offer. Some of them are open platforms for team search, where customers themselves are looking for the necessary developers and employees for outstaff. Here you need to register yourself and enter the data of employees (you can anonymously), and then calmly wait for the customer to write. At the same time, there is no penalty for the transaction: the payment is only for more than five employees in the search base.
Most of the services for finding work on the bench are closed platforms. They call you on the phone, spend time asking about the developers on the bench, and then after a while (sometimes significant) they offer a ready-made version, usually for a percentage of the deal. In fact, each service has its own customer base, according to which they compare offers about employees. If your developers are not in demand, then you will wait a long time for an answer, and your information about the bench may become irrelevant.
Examples of platforms for finding teams (and developers) on the bench: Belarusian Vobla , German Onbench , Ukrainian AOG and Lemon.io , Baltic Aciety , American SourceSeek , VenturePactand Cider , Indian Offshorewebdeveloper .