I hope Charles Handy got it right. From where Im standing the world of free agency looks far bleaker than the cosy expectation of a monthly salary cheque. The hardest part of all is that I didnt have to go. The company management was committed to keeping me.
This commitment, I hasten to add, should not be confused with the notion that management wanted me to stay. It did not. It wanted me to go. I was too expensive. Of course it didnt say as much but this was the unspoken subtext underpinning our negotiations.
My company had a headline commitment to avoid compulsory redundancies, a commendable stance given the drastic fall in advertising revenues across the newspaper industry. But savings had to be made somewhere so early retirement packages were offered to those in their late 50s. I was a special case. As a journalist on secondment, having taken the dotcom shilling, a redundancy deal was available and it looked pretty good from some angles.
It would allow me to sit on my backside for a year and a half if I wanted to take life easy. If not, it would give me a platform on which to build a new career. But would I ever achieve again the cosseted lifestyle I enjoyed as an employee? What about the perks, the expenses, the foreign travel, the health and personal liability insurance, the pension, the IT support, the sabbatical and the executive share options?
Believe me, I know what I have left behind. One colleague, a close friend, thought I was mad. He knew, as I did, that there was no suitable internal job. Just hang around, do whatever they ask, and something will come up in no time, he said. Better to be inside looking out, he argued.
But the option was not quite that of staying or leaving. I could keep the job I cherished my newspaper column on a freelance basis. I could treat the workplace as a club, staying in touch with colleagues, using the library, occupying an occasional desk. I would lose most of the props of permanent working but in return I would get some freedom. And this is the option I have chosen.
So I havent bothered to apply for jobs or search the hidden labour market or place my cv with a head-hunter. I dont want to be employed by anyone ever again. Explaining this to people with proper jobs is difficult.
If only we could dispense with such terms as redundancy and severance. They belong to a different time when the employer held all the aces.
It remains extremely painful to be told by an employer that you have become surplus to requirements. Why? Because when we have been employed all our lives we become institutionalised. No amount of rationalising can remove the feeling of rejection. But this is just a phase and it passes.
The negotiations are now over. I have been given plenty of time to mull things over. Even now, as I write, I could step back from the edge. Frankly, its scary looking into the unknown.
My new friends are other freelances, people who have moved away from traditional careers. Some of them have become interim managers, insisting they will never go back into full-time employment. Some are following personal ambitions to set up their own businesses. All of them at one time or another have grown frustrated with the business attitudes framed by the permanent job.
Human resources professionals are at the sharp end of these nascent working relationships. They must understand the free agent mentality and recognise it when it emerges in their own workforces. Most of all they must realise that ambitions can be shaped outside the corporate mould. If HR directors can be inventive, helping to promote alternative working arrangements, they can avoid the rancour that often accompanies redundancies and maintain goodwill on all sides. Anyway here goes. Ill keep you posted.
richard.donkin@haynet.com
Richard Donkin is employment columnist at the Financial Times