You may not have known it as such, but you’ve probably heard some variation of the infinite monkey theorem. Although it takes many forms, the basic idea is that if you put a large number of monkeys in a room full of typewriters, they’ll eventually produce a script for Hamlet.

What does this have to do with life in Thailand? Well, believe it or not, over the years I’ve observed that a number of Thai companies (perhaps most of them in fact) apply the infinite monkey theorem to employee management. While they don’t employ monkeys, they do engage the nearest human equivalent.

You see, rather than hiring experienced and qualified people who can do the job, they tend to hire people with no experience or qualifications who work cheap. Part of the reasoning behind this is a rather common short-sighted approach to human resources. Since inexperienced people can be paid a lot less, their cost to the company is lower. Of course, that assumes that they can do the job, and do it as productively as someone with more experience, which is practically impossible. The ‘insurance’ Thai managers employ to eventually accomplish something is to hire several low paid people.

Now you’re probably wondering, “If they hire several low paid people instead of one better paid qualified person, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of hiring cheap labor?” Yes, it does. It’s one of the great mysteries of Thai business management, that they never really seem to consider the on-going costs of staff. One of the first lessons I learned when trying to sell software to Thai companies was that you could never justify the cost of an application based savings of staff costs, even if they were potentially significant. As far as virtually ever manager I ever met was concerned, their staff cost nothing. Cutting staff, or even reducing future expansion, would result in no savings, as far as these people were concerned.

There are other reasons for hiring more people than is really necessary to do a job. The commonly held view is that Thais like to work in teams, and do not like to have personal responsibility. That’s why jobs in the government and state owned enterprises are so popular. You don’t have to really do anything, you can’t get fired and if you stick around long enough you can get paid a lot of money.

Is this such a bad thing? After all, the world is full of clueless managers. Yes, I think it is a problem. Such practices make Thai companies terribly slow and inefficient. Thailand is slipping down the rankings of international competitiveness, and their blindness to staffing costs is probably one of the big reasons. Thais still consider their country to be a low cost manufacturing base, even though Cambodia, Vietnam, China and India are now far cheaper.