Changing some details to make it more anonymous on the off chance this situation is recognizable to anyone above me, but the overall facts are still true.
I work on a relatively small team (~20 employees) for a relatively large company. In a recent team meeting, our director was talking about staffing and told us that over $1 million has been given to the team for hiring purposes this year. They went on to say that our current workload doesn't necessitate hiring additional employees and asked if any of us had ideas of new roles that could be created to let them know.
I'm just… baffled. They flat out admitted that every single person on our team could be given $50,000/year raise. But instead they want us to make up new roles for them to hire for work they admitted we don't have the need for.
What kind of logic is this???