Case Study of Budget Cuts

Mr Sunil Doshi hired Manisha Sharma as a summer intern for

developing a corporate. During the interview, Sunil told Manisha that
such a program can save money for the company as it would be a low
cost option for improving employee morale, and that the company
president wanted such a program to be implemented by their
company. He asked her to come up with programs that focussed on
nutrition, exercise, stress management, disease management, and even
life enrichment. Manisha being a dual major in business
administration and health education, this internship exactly matched
her interests. She herself was passionate about physical fitness, and
led a daily Zumba class. So she accepted the internship.

Manisha accepted the internship even though it gave her a very low
stipend. She turned down another summer internship involving a sales
position and that offered a much higher stipend plus commissions,
only because she wanted to focus on her real passion of promoting
health at the workplace. She thought she was making the right choice,
but she had believed the same thing for an internship the previous
summer. That internship turned out to be a disaster; the company was
disorganized and provided her with few of the exciting professional
opportunities that were promised.

During Manisha’s first week of work, the company president

informed Sunil that he would need to make 10 to 15 percent cuts in
his department budget immediately. Furthermore, the company
president told him to avoid any nonessential work functions or
initiatives.

Just after receiving this news, Sunil saw Manisha enter her office
down the hall. He knew how excited she was about developing the
wellness program. Yet he knew that if anything could be classified as
nonessential, it would be her project. He hated the task of telling her
that they had to postpone any work on the wellness program and that
she would be reassigned to other tasks.
Sunil went to Manisha’s cubicle and said, “Manisha, can I have a
minute with you?”
“Sure,” she responded. “Come on in.” Sunil hoped the conversation
would go well.

Fasttrack Networking holds performance evaluations for employees

once per year. Sunil sees the results of the company’s internal,
anonymous employee survey each year. Each year, he notices that
employees do not like the performance evaluations. They think the
evaluations are not fair and do not help them improve.

Sunil has talked to several human resources (HR) directors and

learned that many companies now use continuous performance
reviews with a lot of success. To help transition to continuous
performance reviews, he has asked the following employees to help
out: Sheila Mehta, finance manager; Arun Bhand, intern; and Manisha
Sharma, intern.

Sunil Doshi sat down, shifted uncomfortably, and sighed. Manisha

Sharma turned down the radio volume, but Sunil could still hear the
weather report.

“Manisha, you’ve done a great job for us.” Shrugging his shoulders,
he continued, “My hands are tied, though, and we need to abandon the
wellness program initiative. I’m being forced to cut our budget
immediately. There’s simply no room for new projects that cost
additional money.”

Manisha looked stunned. “I thought we went through this already. We

all know that this will help the employees and save money. Doesn’t
the company care about that?”

“Hey,” Sunil said. “Don’t overreact. Look, it’s not about caring. It’s
about surviving so we can try not to lay anyone off.”

“Are you saying I don’t have an internship anymore?”

“Of course you have an internship,” he said, exasperated. “We’ll find
some other great projects for you to work on. I’m going to schedule a
time this afternoon with Sandhya and you. We can all talk about some
new tasks for you.”

“OK,” Manisha said, “well, whatever you want. I’ll see you this
afternoon then.”

As Sunil got up, Manisha couldn’t hide a look of displeasure. And,

Sunil couldn’t hide his frustration that Manisha didn’t understand his
predicament.

Activities:
1) Analyse the situation from the communication process point of
view i.e. encoding, decoding, noise, etc.
2) Analyse and discuss the communication barriers in the scenario