“Remember those 3 years of 100% remote work during the COVID pandemic, where we broke record renevue 3 years in a row? Yeah, we need you back at the office twice a week. Why? Because we said so.”
Sure, boss.
I have a few complaints about my employer but I’m glad this isn’t one of them. Someone actually asked if we were planning to do an RTO during the quarterly town hall yesterday. Our CEO basically said, “We know there’s value to working in person, and that’s what I prefer to do, but here’s the thing: we have offices in 5 states and employees in 46 states. We’ve been able to recruit the best talent in the country because of our willingness to recruit outside our footprint. Companies that have mandated an RTO are not doing well. We’re not in that position and we have no plans to change our work policy.”
This just happened:
- Wife was promoted to a managment position in the company 1 year ago.
- Was given a list of things they wanted her to accomplish.
- She not only checked off ever item on the list, but exceeded the expectations, sometimes by 10,000% and way faster then they expected.
- Told weekly by her boss how impressed they are, and how great she is doing, and how much of an asset she is.
- A meeting with the management team was held a month ago (mid August). Wife was not invited, despite being part of that team.
- Merit raises are given out every year, between 3% and 10% depending on performance, wife finds out yesterday (9/21/23) that she is only getting the 3%.
I’m more pissed then she is, and I don’t want to fight with her about it, but if it was me, I’d have quit on the spot.
Sounds like a bunch of stuff that should be added to her resume.
Either they’re giving bad evaluations to save on raises, or management is toxic and has unrealistic performance standards.
I agree on both points. Every time I’ve tried to talk to her about how mistreated she is at her job, we end up in a fight, so I’ve stopped trying. We don’t argue much at all, have been together 25 years, and next to no issues. But she feels that it’s just normal to be treated like crap at a job, and you just have to deal with it as it won’t be any better anywhere else, and may be much worse. The only job she ever had where she was treated well, and paid great got shut down for some tax fraud stuff no-one who worked there knew about. That doesn’t help her confidence in finding something decent.
You should* update her resume, shop around her resume, look at some job postings, and get her to talk to some recruiters.
Update her Linkedin too.
It’s one thing to talk about a theoretical possible new job that might be better. It’s another to present her with: “These companies will hire you at X% higher and their Glassdoor reviews are better than your company”
I was like that (comfy in my old job) and it wasn’t till I was confronted with job postings that were 50% higher pay that I was qualified for and at a better company that I realized I was underpaid and needed to switch jobs.
Edit:
* offer to or encourage her to. Maybe it’s a bad idea to go behind her back and update her LinkedIn and resume though you could still check out job postings and glass door reviews.
A year into COVID they had an all hands where they congratulated us on exceeding our productivity goals after a year of WFH. Then they announced that everyone was gonna have to come back to the office, and that because a different OU screwed up and got their dicks sued off there wasn’t any money in the incentives budget and not to expect much in the way of bonuses that year.
Edit: ooh forgot to mention that a bunch of us pushed back because we didn’t think it was safe yet, we got overridden by upper management, then after we came back in our state set a record for daily new COVID cases and daily deaths. It swept through the office, a bunch of my coworkers got really sick and one lady’s husband died.
They offered to cater lunch and then didn’t buy enough burgers for all of us. It was an all-hands meeting and they know how many people worked there, but they somehow thought that only about half of us would show up to the meeting we were all required to attend in person.
I wonder if she can sue them… like they forced everyone into the office and so everyone got COVID and that lady’s husband literally died… that’s pretty fucking horrible. There should be a way to “get back” at them (so to speak) for being so fucking negligent that someone literally fucking died.
There should be. Could get creative. Eventually the law recognized take home exposure duty for asbestos product sellers. The problem with going after the employer is that any action for injuries derivative from an employee-employer relationship is limited to the exclusive jurisdiction of workers’ comp., which absolutely does not cover take-home exposure.
There is always negligence, though. Everyone is liable for the foreseeable, actual harms of their conduct, or said another way, every person owes a duty to all other persons to use reasonable care to avoid causing injury. I guess that claim would get hung up on the medical proof of causation; how could a doctor say the work exposure was the one that caused the disease when the whole state was setting records. Maybe on the right facts, as is always the case for new precedent.
A few months after our company got acquired the new HR rep came to our city for a pep talk. The highlights of which included:
- We’re trying to jack up the value of this company as fast as possible at the expense of all of you
- If you like the idea of job security this isn’t the company for you
Those weren’t her exact words, of course, but that’s what everyone took away from it. I had already given notice at this point.
They kept up the friendly talk like “we love the culture your company has and we want to replicate it across the org” until our original CEO left, then the straight talk started happening. It became very clear to me and others that they just wanted to pump revenue until they could sell us off for a 10x (or higher) multiple.
The somewhat heartening news is that the new CEO and all his ahole underlings all got fired by the board after the dumpster fire they created was fully ablaze. That was about a year after the HR talk I mentioned.
I’ve seen it 3 times. So now if a company I work at sells to another company, I quit.
When this happens, senior staff get layed off. The hard workers finally get the promotion they’ve been slaving for and never getting!*
*The hard workers are now middle management. Big company is trying to leverage their social standing in the company to deliver their morale killing new standards.
Hard workers will ‘underperform,’ even if they don’t. They’ll be replaced by someone the new parent company hires. (likely the wayward son of one of their VCs)
Nobody will like this person. They don’t know anything about how the company used to work, and they’re going to tell you how all the changes are gonna be great.
This will widen the divide between senior management and the ‘boots on the ground.’ The remaining talent that didn’t get promoted and fired or played off will find new work. Soon your company will be a few dozen 20-somethings making $18/hr to do a job that you used to get paid $75k/yr to do.
All for the shareholders.
Edit: if this is your current situation, just bail. You’re not being setup for a career. You’re being set up to be taken advantage of.
This is one of the reasons I don’t leave my job even though I don’t love it. I have job security out my ass, it’s a huge company that has almost no chance of being bought (I think we’re the biggest company in our field but maybe 2nd), the pay is good enough and there’s no asshole middle management. I’m absolutely willing to do boring work for the rest of my life and not have to worry about that kind of stuff.
Feeling this hard right now. I’m gonna stick it out and see it until the end though while keeping my options open.
