A surprising announcement

Every other week at work, we have ‘All hands meetings,’ where the entire staff gets together in the conference room to discuss any relevant happenings in the building or in the company as a whole, to discuss any incidents that happened or special events coming up. This is by no means out of the ordinary, and provides a good basis in ‘reality’ in terms of the company. These meetings are always first thing in the morning at 7:00, though nobody’s ever really rounding up stragglers to get into the conference room on time.

This week’s meeting, though, was a little different from the rest. I could tell that something was up because between the time I walked through the door until the time I got to my desk, two people asked if I was going to the meeting. I indicated I was, set down my things and walked into the conference room.

When I walked in, our Safety officer was in front talking about radon, and how the company had bought us all tester kits for home… again, nothing unusual. But as he finished, it wasn’t the facility manager that stepped up to speak next, it was his boss; in itself this isn’t unusual I suppose, he’s a frequent visitor to our building.  But this time the mood seemed different. And as it turned out, it was for good reason.

Currently the building where I work is a Ford owned building, managed and operated by my company. We provide the staffing for the test cells, the engineering support, and the maintenance staff to keep the facility operational. But what my boss’ boss was there to tell us on this morning was that the arrangement we had all become accustomed to is about to change come January 4th.

On January 4th, Ford will be taking back over the management of our building. They will provide a new facility manager, and a new engineering manager. The official word is that at an operational level, the change will be transparent and things will continue to operate just like they have. The company has been through this before; one of the other facilities that was in a similar management arrangement went through this same transition a few years back, only to be reversed after about a year because it just wasn’t working out.

So at this point, all we can do is just wait and see what happens. They say that everybody’s jobs are safe, with the unfortunate exception of my boss, the facility manager. However, I have a particularly uneasy feeling about this transition. With a particular reason behind that uneasy feeling; a reason that I’m not going to share here. And I’m going to take some hopefully proactive steps to try and alleviate that uneasy feeling.

And just when I thought things were going well…

~ by fatboyrunning on November 16, 2009.