I work for a small company in TX. This company is bare bones in terms policies. We have one owner, one operations person who serves as the owner's proxy, and 14 employees all with the same title. However, each person had different responsibilities for day to day duties. To explain it quickly, there's one person who is operations, but doesn't have the ability to make any decisions so she just kinda walks around being loud and making sure everyone has something to do, there's two or 3 that do accounting tasks only, there's one that does “the mail” (incoming and outgoing), and the rest do one part of a multi step process to “process” time sensitive paperwork as quickly as we can.
However, the owner has been saying this whole time that we're “going to be uncomfortable” and “if you don't like change this isn't the job for you.” He means as the company grows our responsibilities will be changing, which is normal and to be expected by anyone. He talks very end game type conversation to bark orders at people to tell us what has been “changed” except he doesn't give clear direction on how to get to that change. He seems to come in as he pleases to tells us we aren't doing a good enough job at the easy stuff so he's changing it.
So today, he comes in at noon, kills everyone's lunch plans (we all had to take our unpaid lunch at 130 when most are used to going at 12 – because we're not allowed to skip it), and forces us into an hour and a half meeting which changes almost everyone's job roles at the drop of a hot. We have all been blindsided by just how different the daily tasks have changed. He took people that have been trained and used to looking at and filling out paperwork and forced them into researching state tax law. A co-worker quit because not only did her desk move, but her new responsibilities are so overwhelming, she literally cannot understand it. She isn't stupid, but the direction is so nonexistent she just simply can't grasp it and since the rest of us don't have any direction either, we can't help her. We have all been made to feel like we're too stupid to function because that's how the owner talks to us, but in the same sentence tells us that we are all capable of learning and just expects us to run with it.
Sure, most of us can figure something out when given enough tools to do so, but the tools don't exist here. There are no supervisors, bosses, chain of command, HR, written job descriptions, and the owner is 100% not approachable.
Since my coworker quit due to the extreme job change, is there anything she can do? She didn't come to work today to leave before lunch, and I do not blame her for walking out, but I'm curious if there is anything we can do in this type of situation BESIDES quit?