A little while ago, I worked at a small company that hired a consulting firm because we had high employee turnover and the higher ups wanted to see what the issue was. Two of us lower level guys were invited to sit in due to someone being on PTO.
This firm charged $2,000 a day with a minimum of 2 days. We hired them for 3 days plus gifts, food, flights, hotels, etc. Roughly $9k or so since they had to sit first class and stay in a nicer hotel. Over the course of 3 days, they walked around and pretty much told us everything that they thought was wrong (90% of it was cliche’s, i.e. ‘company culture was off, outdated technology, lack of face to face meetings, etc’). The higher ups acted like what these guys were saying was absolute gold while two of us lower guys felt like it was a waste of money.
The last day they brought in some hourly workers to ask questions to and one of the hourly workers asked how much they were paid to come here. They told them the price and this 22 year old looked at all of the higher ups and said “If you would’ve just given us the money that you paid these guys, then maybe people would stick around more.” Everyone laughed, he left and then no one talked about it again. A week later, we approved $80k for a new meeting space with high end chairs and a Starbucks style espresso machine ‘for company culture’. I left shortly after as my pay had been cut twice that year already and I couldn’t wrap my head around that much money for a meeting space when our warehouse had no AC. (Also, most of our meetings were over Teams anyways as the higher ups work remote)
Moral of the story: Not all higher ups are awful, but most have no idea what is actually needed in the day to day for their employees. It’s almost like they forget what it was like to be lower level.