Business people who are skating on thin ice now have only a couple weeks go get off it – around a third of the time they had in 2000.
“Twenty years ago you had at least six weeks to get your act together,” says business modulator Dr. Felicia Wringley of the Cookings Institute. “But with temperatures rising every year, now you can’t even count on two.” She believes that if the situation continues unchecked, by 2027 this will shrink to one week or less.
“People skating on thin ice need time to develop their improvement strategy,” she says. “The faster the ice thaws, the more they panic and make poor decisions. Wringley says companies need to provide the support employees need to get off the ice more quickly.
Toledo, Ohio resurgence brokerage Markington/Mallings is doing just that, through an initiative it launched late last year. Reports Jack Doakley, HR vice president: “We’re combining the traditional improvement seminars and tutoring with more direct techniques like shaming, screaming at them, and withholding food.”
In just three months, he says, the company has reduced average thin ice time from 33 days to 15.
“When I found out I was skating on thin ice,” says Markington timeline analyst,” Helen Hasnover, “I couldn’t imagine how I was going to get off.” But when the company employed a menacing German Shepherd to chase her around the ice, she was off in six days.
As global warming worsens, says Wringley, more companies will have to do similar things for their staffs.
“To most people, melting polar ice caps and dried up farm fields are just vague concepts,” she says. “But for those skating on thin ice, the concept of falling through and drowning isn’t vague at all.”
