Concerning the watching, our assignment for this week poses the following:
Anyway, in Up in the Air, Natalie and Ryan are tasked with traveling around the country to fire people. Watch Ryan’s arc, especially, for help understanding the human relations and human resources approach to management. What approach does Craig (Jason Bateman) use as a manager? What can we tell about a company that hires CTC in the first place?
First, to me, a company hiring from a group like CTC could really go two ways — either they dramatically respect the well-being of their employees and also truly trust the abilities of CTC employees, thus showing their adherence to employee care and support, or the company wishes to distance itself from the care of its employees by discarding supervisor-employee relationships and using the unfamiliar, chilly employees of CTC to handle difficult interactions.
That was a mouthful. The point is this: if the CTC employees do a good job establishing as much warmth and familiarity as possible in their short meeting with a soon-unemployed employee, then it is perfectly fine for a company to use them to manage firing employees. As long as a CTC employee establishes a connection and responds to each employee situationally, then the employee has the potential to feel supported and cared for. In fact, it may even be beneficial for the employee being fired — if their supervisor did a respectable job establishing a positive relationship with the employee, it might be less painful to BOTH the supervisor and the fired employee to have a mediating party handle (gracefully) the difficult conversation.
This leads kindly to the next point: Natalie and Ryan’s development in understanding human relations and resources.
In the beginning, Natalie is procedural. She considers only the end-goal and its mechanical steps: employee says this, CTC employee should say that. She was consumed with simplified diagrams and logical conversation flow, and Ryan’s reaction was not positive. When Natalie introduced the virtual firing systems, Ryan was yet less supportive — despite his manager’s enthusiasm about the new product. Through the movie, it became Ryan’s goal to show Natalie how developed his communication art had to become in order to gracefully, kindly deal with each individual firing. He showed her how ineffective it is to consider a human interaction strictly on logical assumptions — especially in a professional setting, as the range of possible emotions and reactions spanned well-beyond what she originally assumed.
By the end of the movie, Natalie agreed with Ryan — it was vital to handle interpersonal relations delicately while supporting the needs of the employee. This is similar to the workforce’s historic progression from handling employees as mechanical cogs, entities with flowchart-like purpose and progression, to handling employees as individuals with emotion and facets beyond those catered to the professional environment. Natalie still used flowcharts and logic to train CTC employees on their new virtual product, but she specifically keeps individual reactions and personal details in mind when designing the responses. It probably wouldn’t be a perfect product, but it’s a good hybridization attempt between scientific management and human relations.
Natalie and Ryan’s supervisor, Craig, had a similar development. While he was first in favor of the distanced, cold use of technology to fire employees, he and the company came to realize this method was not going to be sustainable. Whether this realization came from general assessments of the product, or if it came after a shocking and sad death of one fired employee, the movie doesn’t specify — but it’s safe to assume CTC, at minimum, realized the potential pitfalls of such a chilly mode of interaction.
Apart from being a decent movie, Up In the Air had dealt considerably with the different styles of communication in the professional environment. It was a warm way to expand on the (somewhat dry and wordy) explanations from the text.
