A workplace where the sun is shining, and the air hums with camaraderie. Now, imagine a sudden storm rolling in, but it’s not the weather we’re talking about – it’s the morale. Yes, we’ve all been there, watching as bosses single-handedly turned a thriving workplace into a morale-deprived zone faster than a magician’s trick. Get ready to hear straight from the source – the employees themselves – about how bosses managed to crush team spirit in a flash.
Banned smartphones in the break room to force us to talk to one another and build camaraderie.
Ends up we didn’t like each other that much.
To cut costs, they started a policy that only certain departments had internet access – it basically started a class system that bred resentment across departments, and caused an exodus from the non-internet teams.
I work in a big corporate building. The same older lady came by everyone’s desk towards the end of the day to collect the trash. Just the sweetest lady ever and every time she’d walk to my desk she’d give me a big smile and ask me how my day was and chat for a minute as she got my trash (usually I’d dump it in for her). I had some rough days but she has a way to cheer me up and send me home on a higher note. I know I’m not the only one either.
So then a few weeks back our work implemented a new policy to ‘cut down on trash usage’. It’s no longer allowed to have a trash bin at our desk and we have to walk across the room and use the community trash to throw anything away. Not a huge deal but the real reason they did it is so they can cut down on costs… ie the cleaning crew.
Sad to say that I haven’t seen Sharon since.
In a company of 6 people, the owner said in a meeting with everyone that his 2 sales guys are irreplaceable and that the rest of us are “just paper pushers”.
Boss Pitched a sales incentive trip to Cancun if the team hit the goal. My team exceeded the goal, and then they cancelled the trip. 2 people quit, I accepted a position with their main competitor, and less than a year later, they closed in bankruptcy. Karmas is a beach.
My boss is looking to retire in the next 3-4 years. He told everyone that he wanted us to come up with our visions for the company and its future over the next 5, 10, 20 years.
We’re a small office of about a half dozen people but we’ve been growing and so everyone brought up growth projections and succession planning once he retires, etc.
His son is the heir apparent and has a precocious 8-year-old so in my 20-year version I even included the grandson joining the business and grooming it to become a legacy company.
My boss went last and we were expecting something acknowledging some of our thoughts or at least an expression of appreciation that the company he founded would live on well past his retirement, be in good hands, etc.
Instead, it was brutal and short. It was something along the lines of “I do everything around here anyway so I should just sell the company to fund my retirement and you can all find other companies to work for in a few years.”
Mood killed. Meeting ended.
“We’re moving manufacturing overseas.”
Uhh… all we do at this facility is manufacturing.
“Yep.”
Never seen a less productive or less motivated workforce. And it was announced over a year before the move too. Would have been better for the company to just spring it on people within two weeks. Although props to them for giving people a chance to find new work ahead of time.
Fired the girl who was in her third trimester of pregnancy three days before her maternity leave was to start.
Old folks home kitchen. Maybe 20 staff members. Boss declared we were too happy and made a new set of rules:
°There was to be absolutely no talking, laughing or jokes. The kitchen was to be silent because we were “distracting ourselves from work”
°Anyone working less than 9 or 10-hour shifts was forbidden bathroom breaks. Going to the bathroom on a shift with less than 9 or 10 hours was a fireable offense. Permitted Bathroom breaks could not be on the clock. Your lunch must be used to use the bathroom. Lunch breaks were 15 minutes long.
°Any communication with management was seen as inappropriate. Staff and management were to be kept separate at all times. (A manager f*cked a staff member and it made a big deal. That’s why this was made)
°You will not be paid overtime but will be expected to work. If you are to clock out by 8 pm but are still needed you must clock out then return to work. Complaints to HR or labor board are fireable offenses. Yes, people complained. Yes, the place was investigated.
Ex-boss was sued. Lost. Morale dropped. They have a hard time keeping employees now and from what I heard most of the new employees are high school students. Ex boss announced a sudden retirement for the end of the year and the kitchen will be taken over by all new people.
I jumped ship early on. Do NOT miss the place.
They replaced the Pepsi and Coke, and coffee machines with f*cking Water and sobe life water machines.
There was literally a riot in the break room.
you do NOT deny overnight workers their caffeine.
The company consisted of something like 1,200 employees at the time and rented out a big conference center for a Christmas party. At the opening of the party, the CFO was giving opening remarks and asked – expecting cheers – if everyone liked their Christmas bonuses.
He got booed.
See, of that 1,200 people, a bit over a thousand were in customer service. No one in customer service got bonuses, only people in the ‘corporate’ departments got bonuses. And our awesome CFO decided to rub everyone’s noses in it because clearly, the Chief Financial Officer of a company would have no idea that 80%+ of his company didn’t get bonuses.
At the same party, the CEO made an announcement that the company would be closed on Friday (Christmas that year was on a Thursday), and everyone got a day off. Now, he had literally just finished making a speech about how everyone was important, and everyone was part of the company, no matter the department. He had shovelled sh*t hard, trying to make CS happier.
The next day, we all got a memo that Customer Service still had to work on that Friday. We apparently didn’t count as ‘everyone,’ and the CEO just hadn’t realized that the announcement wouldn’t apply to anyone.
January saw a 60% attrition rate.
Small business. 20 employees +/-. Boss made a big speech about austerity measures and no raises this year. A week and a half later he drives up in a brand new Silverado with all the bells and whistles. Expensed to the business of course. He would hate to have to pay taxes on those profits. One of the less subtle members of the staff took a literal sh*t in front of his office door.
My coworker lost his dog and came into work teary-eyed. Our manager looked at him, asked him what was wrong and then proceeded to go on a 30-minute rant about him needing to toughen up and it’s just a stupid animal. “Go buy another dumb dog”.
Needless to say, she no longer works for the company.
Put up a poster that said, “Complaining is like vomiting. You feel better but everyone around you feels sick.”. The morale was already bad but it was just a sh*tty way to take a hit at upset employees rather than do anything positive.
Telling employees that they are going to fire you if you don’t make more sales. Then when someone quits, they tell them that was just motivation. We were never going to fire you.
In a very short span of time, they changed everyone’s 401K plan (for worse) and then implemented an office-wide cleanliness policy. No eating at your desk. Only 3 personal items on your desk. Everything labeled. No items other than your keyboard, mouse, and monitors are on your desk at the end of the day.
Talk about pissed off. You could feel the gloom when you walked in. Everyone’s give-a-sh*tter broke at once.
I once had a retail manager who sent out a memo that we worked so hard and did such a great job this month that she gets a bonus. That went over like a lead balloon.
Former teacher. The administrators at my school were usually pretty chill but had a habit of randomly coming up with minor rules that they would enforce for us (male teachers had to wear ties even on jeans day, etc.). Overall it wasn’t bad, except for the time an administrator made a crucial mistake… they banned staff from drinking coffee in front of students.
Now if you’ve never worked in a school, you’d think this isn’t a big deal. When you spend nearly 100% of your day in front of students, it definitely is a big deal.
First, we tried to find any loophole we could. Energy drinks? Banned the next week. Tea? Banned two days later. It was chaos.
Eventually, we realized they couldn’t fire an entire school’s worth of teachers and aides, so we ended up doing the one thing that private schools fear most: we formed a union.
Realistically, it was more of a weird pseudo-union focused specifically on civil disobedience regarding the coffee issue, but it ruffled feathers nonetheless. The administrators caved to our “demands”, allowed us to drink coffee again, and even bought each of us a reusable coffee mug as a gesture of goodwill.
And that’s the story of how a handful of school administrators almost accidentally created a teachers union over a complete non-issue.
I had a boss everyone loved, then she got transferred to another store and the new guy that replaced her decided the schedule that we’d all gotten used to need to be “shaken up”. He posted the next week’s schedule that was completely different than it had been under the previous manager, got a bunch of complaints from people saying they can’t work x days or y times and it SEEMED he was receptive since he took that schedule down. Then suddenly BAM, he just reposted the same exact schedule and said f*ck everyone.
Oh, we had some people calling in sick from time to time under the old manager, but this new manager has pretty much half his crew every single day calling out because of his sh*tty tactics.
Here’s the first thing to learn about being a good manager…you don’t need to “shake things up” for people to be better workers. You don’t need to “put your mark” on anything if it’s working just fine the way it was.
I cancelled the Christmas party and Christmas bonuses for the whole company because we “didn’t have the money for it.” I found out later that the CEO and the CTO used company funds to take a week-long ski vacation in Whistler instead of doing something nice for the employees. You better believe I spread that evidence around the office.
I held a super positive, pep rally-style company-wide meeting about how they were going to start combining our sick days with our vacation days and now just call them ‘PTO.’ This was presented to us as a great thing since we could all now use our PTO days fully as vacation days if we wanted to. Once the system was implemented, everyone realized that instead of getting 10 vacation days and 10 sick days per year, we now all had 15 PTO days. Everyone was pissed.
Try working in IT. It’s a job where if you work absolutely perfectly, you’re totally invisible and only appear on the radar when something f*cks up.
Just a few weeks ago we did a major office move. My department worked back-to-back 12-18 hour days to get everything moved over, which we managed with less than half a day’s downtime (and we were moving the company’s main data center).
By the end of the final weekend after carrying 30+ servers (plus cabs) up four stories, re-cabling 200+ desks and literally moving trucks worth of gear I got home and my legs just wouldn’t work any more. I still have the blisters on my feet from walking about 30 miles in two days…and I was still at my desk at 7 am the next day running around the office fixing teething issues.
Then, a few days ago the country chief got the whole office together to thank everyone for their hard work. He had a stack of envelopes with ‘thank you’ card £50 vouchers in them. Everyone who volunteered to help with the move got one…including the people who ‘volunteered’ to have an early snoop around the new office, spent 30 minutes on site and did precisely f*ck all.
Do you know who didn’t get a mention or an envelope? Anyone in IT. The people who were there worked unpaid overtime until 2 am for weeks.
I had a big fight with his wife in front of everybody. I don’t think you should run a restaurant with your family members unless you’re really solid with each other.
They got rid of their night cleaning crew the week after I started and we had to learn how to clean the whole department on our own before close. I work in a meat department so this meant taking apart and cleaning 2 meat grinders and a band saw that were covered with meat goop. Almost the whole department quit because of this, but I stuck around and got the hang of it. After about 3 months though they hired the cleaning crew back. Now closing is a breeze.
I worked at a family-owned market that was well-known and loved by locals. The owners were a lovely couple that took care of their employees and would bend over backwards for their customers. They were very active in the community and highly respected. They had a few core employees and would hire temp staff during the summer and holidays. The temps were mostly high schoolers and college kids that were home on break. They would bring back the same people as long as they could and the kids would try to stay as long as they could. The pay was well above market for those positions, we could shop and get a 75% discount, after six months you got two weeks of paid vacation, and the owners would close the store a couple of days a year and host a party for all of the employees. It was the best job any high schooler in the area could get. I lived right next to the store and my parents were friends with the owners so I was given a job there. All my friends were jealous.
After working there for a few years, the couple decided they wanted to retire to spend time with their daughter and her children in another state. Many tears were shed and they had a huge retirement party where they introduced their son to everyone and told us he was taking over. They gushed about his prestigious business education and background.
As soon as they were gone, the son decided he was going to remake the store in his image. He fired basically all the staff, most of whom had been there for 10 to 15+ years. He then staffed the whole place with homeschooled kids and junkies. He cut the discounts and vacations. He hired some old high school friends to manage the place so he could take the profits to go party and get coked out.
The shop went from having the same staff for years to having to retrain an entirely new staff every other month. No one wanted to stay. Managers were reporting perfectly good products as damaged and taking them home. Shelves sat empty. Locals stopped shopping there. The place became a corpse of what it had been. The original owners had enough of their friends complaining to them about their son that they came back for a short time and tried to make it right, but it was too late. Their original staff had all moved on and vendors had stopped doing business with the store. They decided to close the store, sell the property, and move away permanently.
Changed up the metrics that determined people’s bonuses. And included things that were important for the business to know, but completely beyond the control of the people whose bonuses were impacted.
For example, we had a “right party contact” rate — how many times you actually got the person you were calling vs the number of calls you actually made. The problem was the phone number list came from elsewhere, and the people making the calls were just given a list of numbers, and you had to call them all. No leeway.
So you’re calling blind from a list you don’t control… and get penalized if the list is sh*t.
Oddly enough, the people in charge of making the phone number lists, and their bonuses were not influenced by the right party contact rate.
Started firing people by lining two up at a time and seeing which one they prefer to keep on. Didn’t matter if you were there for 20 years or 2. Also hiring management from outside and not promoting within which means the new managers have no knowledge of anything that the company does in terms of ethics, procedures, or employee status. It has turned this ‘clique’ type environment into every person for themselves. Very toxic.
I was an engineering intern at a factory owned by a German company but located in the US South. It happened to be the summer of the World Cup and US-Germany was playing on a Thursday.
The factory had engineers, fabricators, and line workers. The engineers worked on long-term timelines, but the fabricators and the line workers had weekly quotas. In general, the line outperformed quota (they were based on orders and the line could outpace the orders if needed). So normally the line reached the weekly quota by sometime late Thursday or early Friday.
The engineering interns brought up that we wanted to watch part of the game during our lunch break on the big projector in one of the conference rooms. The HR guy in charge of scheduling the room ran with the idea and ordered pizza for the entire factory to sit and watch the game.
Thursday comes and the line is on pace to finish quota that afternoon (so had Friday to work extra/cut off early). The whole factory staff shows up to watch the game, eat food, and relax for a bit. Morale is high as a bunch of East Tennessee folk are hooting and hollering over a soccer match of all things.
Out of nowhere the plant manager strolls by and says “I thought we were here to work”. The room was empty for about 100 seconds. The interns were all pissed and hid in the warehouse watching the second half on one of our phones. F*ck that guy
Large factory (Not Unionized). Each department clocks in at a different place, mainly that department’s breakroom. My department clocked in across the facility from the main entrance, which meant it took about 15 minutes to walk from the front door to where you clocked in and out, and another 5 to walk from that entrance to the parking lot. There was a side exit that we would use, however, that literally cut that walk down from 20 minutes to 3, since our department was right next to the parking lot.
Management decided that ALL employees must enter and exit through the SAME DOOR. Which meant we had to walk all the way down to the main entrance and then back around to our cars.
There was so much rebellion from the employees in our department that they had to bar the door shut with 2 x 4s. Jokes on them, even non-unionized employees can be a pain in the a**. We contacted the fire marshall, who upon seeing a fire exit barricaded, fined the company 8,000$
We still were not “allowed” to enter through this door, but they stopped trying to stop us.
I worked for a concierge company owned and run by a crazy lady. We had contracts with buildings and she’d routinely lose the contracts by taking meetings with them and then acting crazy. She was actually banned from one of the buildings that we still had a contract with.
Anyways, I worked at a building with about 4 other people. We were basically security guards checking in guests all day and we didn’t make much money. After hiring this sh*tty employee who basically wouldn’t do his job and instead surfed the internet right in front of the guests, rather than firing said sh*tty employee, they took away our internet access. This made employee performance worst as now everyone had to stare down at their cell phones, instead of straight ahead at the computer. Even I would occasionally get caught staring at my phone instead of the guest in front of me (some people are quiet as heck). So then they banned our phones. Which, banning someone’s phone basically just means that whenever a supervisor is present (which was about 5 minutes per day) nobody was on their phones and the rest of the time it was phone-city all day every day.
This was like a month-long battle and most of the 5 person team we started with ended up quitting. Guess who the one dude that didn’t quit was? The original sh*tty employee who I know continued to ignore guests and stare at his phone because I stayed friends with some people in the building and would stop by from time to
For years I worked in a high-stress, high-turnover, low-paying job doing caregiving for adults with developmental disabilities. These issues are typical in this field, and my company, like many, exploited salaried employees by expecting them to work 50-60 hours regularly and often more. I went months at a time working 70, 80, 90 hour weeks. I stayed through a lot of b*llsh*t because I loved the folks I served.
Last year, corporate required all managers to attend mandatory training about Caregiver Fatigue.
It made it worse for me to have language to describe the fatigue and burnout I’d been experiencing for years.
Within the meeting, corporate acknowledged that they didn’t pay us enough and that many employees we supervised were literally homeless, food insecure, or on the verge of it. But, “increased pay is not on the table right now so let’s talk about other things we can do.”
They crowdsourced this exhausted group of salaried workers, who suggested things like starting a company food pantry, a company clothing drive, and compiling lists of shelters in the area.
That meeting was so blood-boilingly infuriating to sit through that I made the decision that day it was time to finally get out. I worked my last day for that employer this summer.
I’m still looking for a full-time job, and I’m trying to hold out for a company that values my work enough to pay me fairly. In an ideal world, this new company doesn’t add insult to injury by mandating training about how to recognize tell-tale signs of being ready to snap.
Hopefully, when I’ve had some time to recover, I’ll be able to come up with some lasting ways to change things in the caregiving industry. These systemic problems will only compound as the baby boomers continue to age.
This was almost 20 years ago. I was the sole IT guy for a small privately owned research company, my specialty was nanoscale doodahs for government agencies, NASA, aerospace, that kinda stuff. Had about 80 employees at the time this happened.
We were given performance goals for the company as a whole (rather than individual goals) that if met would get us all a nice bonus. Goals were met. The week we were supposed to get the bonus we had an all-hands meeting where the CEO and CFO explained that our bonuses could not be paid right now, but would be paid eventually (pinky swear!). That was a dent in the morale of the company but not devastating.
Layoffs started a couple of weeks after that and continued in small batches every couple of weeks. Rather than doing what needed to be done up front they just kept laying off a handful of people here and there. It really destroyed everyone’s morale wondering who was going this week, who was going next week. Of course, after a few of these everyone saw the writing on the wall and there wasn’t any good morale left to speak of. By the time I found another job a few months later, we were down to 30 people. Never did get those bonuses.
Worked out for me though, went from 32k to 45k at the new job. And I got to metaphorically laugh in my boss’s face when he offered to match that salary after he had turned down a $5K raise I asked for a couple of months prior.
It was a one-two punch.
The company-wide meeting announced the promotion of several high-level management and executives (mostly title and responsibility changes). Lots of smiles and handshakes, not unlike a college graduation ceremony.
After these promotion announcements, they declared that due to the stagnant economy and poor sales, the entire company would be experiencing a pay freeze as a result. So, no raises for anyone.
They then concluded the meeting by discontinuing “Casual Fridays.” So, no more jeans on Friday.
It almost felt like it was designed to make people want to quit and leave. It worked though, I and many others moved on to greener pastures within the year.
Banned smartphones in the break room to force us to talk to one another and build camaraderie.
So my SO just had this happen. Working in a call center, she was an employee of the month–had some of their highest metrics, etc. She noticed she started getting back-to-back calls while everyone else was getting 15+ minutes of availability. Contacted her boss, her boss’s boss, and was continually being reassured that the issue was getting looked into. Her being stressed and overworked went on for 3 months.
Eventually, she messaged the regional manager–and it was fixed the very next day. My acting theory is that one of her managers placed her into a priority queue to make their own stats look better.
But everything worked out, right? Nope. She got an email today stating that she wouldn’t be getting her bonus because she was using ACW too much; it’s a temporary state you can place yourself in which postpones you being placed into the call queue in order to finish up your work from the previous call. She literally had no choice because she got seconds between calls.
Funny thing? She saved documentation of everything. Threw her managers under the bus, quit, and got another job all in the same day.
“No raises or bonuses this year due to company performance, but I will make it up to you by taking the whole company to the lake for a trip on my new 30ft boat”
I worked at a restaurant with a sh*t-tipped minimum– $2.63 an hour. We’d be penalized for being even 5 minutes late so lots of us showed up 20-30 min early to make sure we’d avoid the penalty (this is Boston, so that was an appropriate gamble, I’ve gotten stuck on the T for 10-20 min on NUMEROUS occasions), and we’d just get right to work– and there’s plenty to do when opening a big restaurant. So we’d clock in and start working– no one was clocking in and failing to work. In fact, I liked getting there early because the kitchen would get up to 113, most of the morning prep occurred in the kitchen and was fairly rigorous, we didn’t really air condition and had to wear long-sleeved shirts and pants. So I could knock everything out in a tank and shorts, change into my uniform, and not start my shift a sweaty mess.
The manager gave us a big lecture about how it adds up, even if it IS only $2.63 an hour. She made a new rule that we couldn’t clock in more than 10 minutes before our shift began, EVEN IF WE WERE WORKING. By the way, that’s a 15-minute window of appropriate clocking-in time, in Boston, with a notoriously unreliably public transportation system, crazy weather, and over-clogged roads.
The company owner left on a 2-week vacation to Chile without telling anyone. It was a small marketing firm with about 7 employees. I texted him on Monday morning around 11:30 a.m. asking where he was (he stayed out late drinking pretty frequently and often didn’t roll in until 11:00 a.m.) He informed me he was on vacation and put me in charge for the next two weeks, probably because I was lucky enough to be the first person to text him. He missed two client meetings and one campaign pitch, all of which went okay and we managed without him. I even signed on a new account, and had all the paperwork completed and was working on brand new campaign ideas to show him when he returned. He only called twice to check-in. Showed up two weeks later and declared that the company was bankrupt and we were all out of jobs. So yeah. That was an instant morale killer.
In the company I worked for, I was one of three salespeople. The operations manager, who was my line manager too, insisted that when I was in the office, with just him and 4 others who were dressed casually, had to wear a tie. Said it to me in front of the others. He didn’t wear a tie. We were in an industry where relationships with customers made business suits and ties were not normal.
So f*ck him, I wore the most horrific ties I could find, Christmas ones in summer, ones colorblind people wouldn’t be seen dead in. Shiny ones with fish on.
He challenged me on it and I asked him to put it in writing explaining the reason for it and show me where it was on my contract. He backed down, I left shortly afterwards to a rival company and made it my business to wreck them.
I was a hard worker, like an extremely hard worker. One day a supervisor asked why I wasn’t working at my usual pace, so I told him I was facing homelessness if I couldn’t find somewhere to live.
He said “Hey well I really need my superstar out here! I depend on you getting a lot done for me.” He couldn’t care any less about my problem…I was an employee who made him look good because I got results and was not a human being.
I never worked hard again and personally undermined the work ethic of everyone I came in contact with. I didn’t have to learn that particular lesson a second time.
Several years ago, I was employed at a company that was notorious for its high-stress, heavy-workload atmosphere. There were a number of different departments that all collaborated (to some extent) on upcoming projects and releases, along with a few ancillary teams that focused on either legal matters or community management. Despite everyone having discrete tasks and assignments, the organization’s structure for bonuses was based entirely on overall profits, meaning that many people – particularly those folks working in a support capacity – had about as much control over their own success as they did over whether or not a suicidal bird would smack into one of the building’s windows.
That didn’t stop the folks in upper management from pretending otherwise, though.
“If you all work hard,” various high-level managers used to say, “you’ll be taking home five percent of your total salary as a bonus! If we meet certain milestones, you might even get ten percent!”
“What about those of us who always work hard?” someone would respond. “Our jobs don’t directly affect revenue!”
“Shut up,” the managers would reply. “Also, shut up.”
I may be paraphrasing.
Anyway, this state of affairs was eventually recognized as being a less-than-appealing carrot for the company’s workhorses, and a solution was proposed: Every department’s quarterly budget would be weighed against quarterly revenue, and the resulting percentage would be used to calculate individual bonuses. There was some kind of complicated equation which allegedly governed this, and the change was trumpeted as being good for everyone. Finally, we were told, our individual efforts would actually contribute to our bonuses!
It didn’t take long for someone to notice a slight problem, though The so-called “change” wasn’t really a change at all. It was just a convoluted way of hiding the fact that everyone was still being held accountable for overall success, regardless of what they actually did. Furthermore, it was discovered that the “milestones” had been pushed up significantly, meaning that nobody would get a bonus unless some fairly unrealistic goals were met. The fanfare and fawning over the whole thing seemed disingenuous at best.
Needless to say, someone pointed this out.
“Shut up,” the managers replied.
Company policy was that personal phones were to be kept in the back of the company vehicle except for lunch. For years no one cared as long as you weren’t on your phone playing games/texting instead of working. Now all of a sudden they are going crazy about this policy and are checking us when we leave and return to the shop, and they are also coming out randomly to do “safety inspections.” They are writing people up just for having their phones in their pockets. It literally feels like a prison.
We have 4 employees. 1 went on vacation, and another called out sick on my day off. We aren’t allowed to work alone so I had to cover, which forced me into overtime.
“Thank you for coming in on your day off. Mind if I move your hours around so I don’t have to pay you overtime?”
The company I was working for had an incredibly large IT department. It was big enough that I literally had nothing to do for 6 months. Every day I’d get to work and ask my manager what he wanted me to work on. Every day he’d tell me that he didn’t have anything for me yet. I was a contractor and not even a regular employee.
One day they announced that there were going to be layoffs. I figured I would be one of the first ones out the door so I got my stuff in order. Most of us sat in a giant cube farm (half-height walls) and the managers were arranged in offices surrounding them. There were maybe 100 cubes in a given area, with 3 of those setups per floor across 4 floors. There were a lot of people in this “department”.
The day after the announcement all of the managers walked out of their offices at 10 am and stood by their doors. A few minutes went by and people started talking to those closest to them wondering what was happening. Then, every couple of minutes one of the workers would stand up, walk over to a manager and then be escorted out. It didn’t take long to figure out they were being fired via email.
After half the floor was walked out the managers said “It’s all over, get back to work.” For some reason, I still had a job. So, I walked into my manager’s office (like I did every day) and asked if they had anything they wanted me to work on. He said no. Then he gave me a raise and extended my contract. It was absolutely surreal.
I stayed there for about a year while I worked on a personal project. When that project was over I left.
CEO called an all-hands meeting on a Thursday afternoon at a company of ~30 and gave a long presentation. It started with how we’re a great team, and have a huge opportunity ahead of us (the truth). Then pivoted to how most people die trying to summit K2 and used that as a metaphor for how we were all going to be held to a higher standard so we could really take over the industry. It was only going to get harder from here.
Anyone who wasn’t 110% committed was to resign by EOD Friday and get 2 months’ severance. My best guess was he was trying to force the hand of a couple of folks, but almost half the company walked. This was several months ago. My last day was two weeks ago. When I resigned, there were 6 employees left.
When I first came to my new job it was a mess and they had just completely bombed an inspection. I mean it was embarrassing and I was only there for a week when it happened, heads rolled and people were forced out of the organization. I took responsibility for the entire program when the guy in charge of it “retired” and vowed to myself it wouldn’t happen again, I didn’t tell anyone this, I just took it and ran with it.
After 2 years of busting my *** ensuring it was perfect, we had another inspection. The inspector informed the higher-ups it was not only the best inspection that our unit has ever had, but also one of the best he’s seen in 10 years. I’m on cloud nine thinking I’m a bad*ss and I’m sure as h*ll gonna get some sort of recognition for it, so I wait…and wait…and wait. Nothing. A month goes by and my boss and I get called into the head bosses office only to be told, “The inspector must have missed something or didn’t know what he’s talking about because no one person could have fixed all this in 2 years”. Needless to say, I haven’t been super pumped about going to work lately and I’ve almost given up caring about all the little details.
We were once in the middle of a very stressful period of work, and everyone was feeling it. However, one afternoon, an off-hand comment turned into a conversation that we all got involved with and led to a few laughs. My manager, returning from a meeting, piped up “Oh we’ve finished tomorrow’s work, have we? What’s all this about (insert subject matter)”. The entire team instantly deflated.
Unnecessary. Every employee needs time to blow off a little steam.
The head of the department realised that we weren’t about to meet our targets for the financial year. Completely banned annual leave for 3 months, forced anyone who didn’t fill in their timesheet on time to attend a disciplinary meeting (despite problems with the system meaning that some didn’t get filled in) and generally had lower management terrified, causing a massive blame culture and several people to be signed off with mental health issues.
In the end, the employee survey which went to his bosses was hilariously bad, and he’s now somewhere else making some other people’s lives a misery. The best part was when his replacement came in and fired his right-hand man who was also a d*ck.