I work for a company where I have the opportunity to help out my higher ups and peers with projects, answering questions, running small meetings, so on and so forth. This specific position isn't considered an actual “position”, so it doesn't come with a raise or any kind of legitimate title– you're just picked by your work ethic and abilities. (Along with stats, metrics, etc.)
A couple months ago I was given a lot of responsibility by one of my coaches to help improve our team. I had been in this “position” for over a year now, so i jumped right in to doing what I could. (Along with several other peers who were also given this responsibility.) I was organizing workspaces, sending emails, creating action plans, making schedules, making my own schedule, implementing new activities, running meetings, the list goes on. Between the three of us, we were running the team (without being compensated ) and for the most part were fine with it because we felt fullfilled. We shared with each other that we were enjoying our jobs for the first time in a long time.
Fast forward to now.
Some of our higher ups shifted and our leadership shifted as well, so we got a new coach. Come to find out that the amount of work we were doing wasnt our responsibility (and was way above our pay grade) so things had to change. If I could guess it's because they wanted to cover up the fact that we were doing considerably more work than what we were being paid for and they didn't want to deal with it if we brought this up. They brought up stats (apparently we were doing worse off than other teams) and hours worked (significantly more) and blamed our work on this. (Not leadership who told us this was okay and were essentially having us do their work for them.)
I got demoted for my stats not being where they needed to be and was told I wasn't qualified for being in this “position”. (Without the work I was doing being taken into consideration for why my stats were low and it wasn't communicated before hand that they had to be at a certain level to maintain my “position”) 90% of my work got discarded, downplayed and not given validation beyond “thanks, we appreciate you.” One of these things was a project that had just been put in place to improve our team and was only given 2 weeks to function before being scraped.
All and all I feel used, under appreciated, devalued and discarded. I understand business practices but I think the way this situation was handled was unfair. I would understand things needing to change in order to align with stats and best practices, but after practically carrying a team for months I don't think it's right to be demoted.