So I was promoted to manager about a month ago, and I am determined to never end up on r/antiwork for the wrong reasons. I even told my bosses that my priority was the mental health and well-being of the people working in my dept.
Honestly my mindset is that id rather get fired for being a manager who actually fights for the people who work for me, than being one of those who works them to death for shitty wages.
The first thing I fought for was getting raises for my dept that were above what the company would deem “cost of living” 3% to 5% wont cut it this year (Honestly 15% wont really cut it), I've seen so many posts about how companies act like a 5% raise is some huge deal, but frankly I saw it as an insult to my dept.
After some back and forth with the Exec team I was able to strike a deal where If I was able to save a certain amount of money in software licensing, I could allocate extra money to raises, and this is another point of contention with me because my company will not think twice about spending 200k a year to license some shitty software that nobody wants to use, but lord knows paying 100k a year to people who can probably find an open source version of the software seems foreign to them.
After everything was said and done I was able to give everyone a 30% raise this year while still saving the company around 50k a year. Everyone on my team now makes between 85k to 90k, and my goal before I'm done is to get them all to six figures. I make 87k as their manager.
I also them know that taking time off is encouraged, I have people who haven't taken more than one day off in years. I believe PTO is yours to use whenever you want and I even told them that if they wake up one morning and just don't feel like going to work that day to just email me. In fact I got a guy who emailed me last night saying he wanted to sleep in on a Monday and not work, which was fine with me, and if for some reason their PTO is “too low” I'll send them an email letting them know that they have flex time for working late on that “one” project. I make sure to put everything in writing for them as well.
I'm determined to be the antiboss, pay them well, treat them like adult humans, and shield them from the political BS that happens in large companies, I'd like to think a month in that I've started to improve their work life.
I want to be the manager I always wanted, but never had. Wish me luck, I'll keep r/antiwork as a reference of how NOT to manage people, even if it costs me my job.