I have been with my company for 5 years now. Over this period of time they have relentlessly preached the importance of culture and employee appreciation. I have always bought into it, and was even part of the team that taught the 2-day class that was meant to teach employees how to adjust their thought patterns to be high performers. I’ve been promoted three times over my time with the company and preached how great the place is to anyone that would listen.
But that was while the company was turning unreal profits.
Earlier this year my team was given the green light to adopt a new product that will allow my team to do what we do more efficiently. Since we already had a product we used, we contacted that company and let them know our intentions to move on. We stripped down our contract to a bare-bones offering just to remain operational during the transition.
And then the economy turned and the company profits went way down. The company says no new service adoptions. That’s fine, it makes sense to me. I suggest that we will just continue using the program we have in place. But here’s the problem, the company won’t allow us to turn back on our services we were using before we switched to bare-bones. They consider it a new expense even though we were paying it just a few months ago.
A couple people from our team of 6 get frustrated and leave. The company won’t allow us to hire replacements for them. So now there’s 4 of us doing the work of 6, and the company expects the same level of productivity. Since we are all doing more work now, shouldn’t we be entitled to salary increases? Nope, no new raises allowed.
While all of this is going on, I happen to review invoices the company has processed over the last month and notice something interesting. It turns out the company bought Super Bowl tickets and a week of rooms at Caesar’s Palace for all of the executives. So it seems the only people that need to make sacrifices are those of us actually doing the work.