It seems like every company I have worked for has been running with about half the number of employees as would be optimal, and looking around this doesn’t appear to be uncommon. My confusion comes from the fact that from my experience management doesn’t really seem to care or see this as a problem. Workers are running themselves ragged trying to complete the work of 8 employees with only 3-4 employees. Employees complain that this is unsustainable and management just brushes them off and says everything is fine, they make promises to hire more staff that never materialize or they make vague promises of bonuses for the extra work that they never pay out, then they are surprised when they have high turnover rates. This seems like such a simple concept that to get X output you need Y employees and if you cut the number of employees in half the output gets cut in half but it seems like this just flys over most employers heads and they expect the same output from 3 employees that they got from 8 and then proceed to berate people and call them lazy when that doesn’t happen. I profoundly don’t understand why they don’t understand this. Any insight into why this seems to be the norm would be appreciated.