A few years ago I was a manager at my company. That only lasted a year because managing other people turned out to be way more stressful than I had anticipated, but overall my company was a good place to work and I loved the managers in my department. I asked to the returned back to my old position and my company did it without hesitation. The culture in our department was completely different back then. Managers were kind respectful towards us, transparent, held themselves accountable and truly considered how their policies would impact the workers who must abide by them. In the last few years our management was replaced and everything’s all gone to shit since then, particularly in the last year. Our management structure has turned into an absolute dumpster fire. Hostile, incompetent, unprofessional, lying and tricking people into doing extra work, forcing us to start working weekends and holidays with no extra pay, and they have gone off the deep end with petty micromanaging, extremely excessive punishment, and threatening to rescind approved PTO for the most baffling reasons, I think it’s more to humble us and remind us of who is in charge. Our corporate survey scores tanked and now they pretend they’re interested in hearing our concerns and want to “do better” but it’s complete bullshit. All lip service, no real improvements. They also informed us we will be expected to perform WAY MORE work than we currently do now, for my team alone it’s a 50% increase. I have had to make reports to our corporate ethics hotline FIVE TIMES in the last year and was retaliated against and intimidated to shut me up. Every department meeting now is so hostile. We just had one this past week that got so bad one of our directors (who is a lying incompetent piece of shit that hadn’t so much as sent an email to us in at least a year) had to jump in on the meeting and try to calm people down. But again it was more bullshit platitudes which at this point we can all see right through.
I realize this is likely an attempt to weed people out. We’re rolling out AI tech that they swear will not replace employees but the writing is on the wall. I know we’ll get the axe as soon as they can get rid of us and they want to minimize the number of people they need to pay unemployment and severance to.
One thing I cannot get over is how in the fuck can our managers not be ashamed of themselves?? Particularly the ones who have to face the employees who are so constantly harassed now? If I were still a manager today I couldn’t live with myself. I would be so ashamed of being a part of a culture that enables lying and bullying, and stupid micromanaging (we are being audited for our spelling and if we have misspelled words in our documentation we have heavy deductions in our audits which affects eoy reviews), I feel like a part of me would die inside. It’s one thing to work a stupid meaningless job. I mean, work to live, right? But to also be duplicitous condescending and hostile, nitpicking over the dumbest fucking shit, how do managers in my company have any respect for themselves? They’ve destroyed any respect employees in our department had for the managers at this point, they have to at least recognize something is wrong.