To: All Staff Members.

Re: COMPANY PERFORMANCE

Dear Staff Members,

It cannot of escaped your notice that we have not been doing too well lately. The monthly finance figures are well down on expectations and the trend does not look good. It is important to understand that in such situations it is the company working as a whole who are to blame. McGrimsby and Co have undertaken a management level financial review and found that the Board are not responsible for the failures, therefore I am afraid that blame must lay firmly at your feet.

As a result of your failures, we must take drastic action to regain control of the share price that you have lost. With immediate effect the following changes will be made:
 

1. MIS, HR, Finance, Training and Legal departments will be closed down.
2. Dawn, from Purchasing, will be retained for typing up customer bills and processing payments. All other Purchasing staff are to leave.
3. All manager's company cars will be returned by close of business tonight. A recent report in CEO Weekly indicated that on average £5 is found within each company car when it is returned. Therefore, please check your cars carefully and ensure that this sum is present. Failure to do this will result in a docking of £10 from your next month's pay.
4. Biscuits, coffee and tea will no longer be povided in any meetings. You are advised to bring a flask to work or pay 5p per use of the kettles.
5. The charges on cloakroon coin-op machines will be increased by 50% at midnight tonight.
6. Business travel is banned. All travel between company sites is now classed as private use and therefore you may NOT claim such travel on expenses. To make this solution workable, we have changed your terms and conditions of employment so that your permanant place of work is always the site that you are on at that moment in time. Thus any travel to any site is just your normal commuting to work and is not classed as business travel.
7. Subsidies in the staff restaurant are being removed. To recover the costs of the subsidies given to date, the food will be returned to its normal market price plus a top up to recover previous subsidies. From tomorrow a round of toast will cost £3.98.
8. Staff members wishing to take the casual wear dress option may do so for a charge of £1 per day. The existing charge of 50p per day for formal dress will continue.
9. There will be a total company wide restructure. However, to avoid the complication of lengthy analysis for the new organisation I have decided to reinstate the old structure exactly as it is today. All staff affected will have to apply for their old jobs, but the good news is that you will all be taken on without question for a small fee. All new posts take effect from Monday.
10. The redundancy programme for those affected by the closing departments will come in to force on Tuesday. However, as none of you will have been in post for the required minimum period you will not be eligible.

As I said before, we are all in this together, and so the directors have agreed to their own cuts¹:
 

1. With immediate effect Directors will no longer be able to claim for the Smoked Salmon Platter pick-me-up, car valeting, Discrete Escorts Ltd.,  publications: Financial Times, Playbody, Country Life, Horse and Hound, Horse and Another Horse, A Whole Load of Horses, Beano or Beazzer.
2. John Spooner, Director of the Northampington area, will be cut.
3. Private use of the company jet will only be supported for official events, such as the World Cup.
4. Private use of the company yacht is suspended whilst the Chairman is borrowing it indefinately as this is a tax benefit for TeleCrumb.

Kindly regards and many felicitations,
Janice Spryhorn-Likely,
PA to the Group MD, David Splinter-Fould.

TeleCrumb is a totally fictitious company. This memorandum is copyright Tony Frampton 2001. The Board accept no liablity for anything whatsoever.