Thank you for sharing this. It hits close to home, since I have one week left until I am laid off. This wasn’t announced anywhere. In fact, we were told not to even tell other sections of the business and definitely not anyone outside of our immediate families. I know the real reason why… optics.
I was just talking to a coworker about this kind of surreptitious chicanery that businesses do where instead of laying people off, they wait for people to leave, promise a backfill, and then never give it — or give it to another team. Our team wasted away like this for years. The workload did not decrease proportionately with the workforce. My workload doubled, and I burned out hard. People saw the trend and started jumping ship, which made it harder on everyone left behind, because the backfills would never come. And yet our internal memos were filled with little hand-clapping emojis over how many people had been hired that year. I held a lot of resentment. The best I can do now is educate others about it and promise not to go back to corporate.
I therefore appreciate you so eloquently expressing exactly how it works.
I worked at a company that constantly struggled to be profitable. They’d make an decision to hire an employee, but the current work culture was so ingrained that it was nearly impossible to bring in anyone new. So then people would churn through and leave… and their work had to be picked up by other people, because at that point the CEO would decide that it was better to save money. It was a horribly vicious cycle. “Promising to backfill” is a game so many companies play.
Thank you for sharing this. It hits close to home, since I have one week left until I am laid off. This wasn’t announced anywhere. In fact, we were told not to even tell other sections of the business and definitely not anyone outside of our immediate families. I know the real reason why… optics.
I was just talking to a coworker about this kind of surreptitious chicanery that businesses do where instead of laying people off, they wait for people to leave, promise a backfill, and then never give it — or give it to another team. Our team wasted away like this for years. The workload did not decrease proportionately with the workforce. My workload doubled, and I burned out hard. People saw the trend and started jumping ship, which made it harder on everyone left behind, because the backfills would never come. And yet our internal memos were filled with little hand-clapping emojis over how many people had been hired that year. I held a lot of resentment. The best I can do now is educate others about it and promise not to go back to corporate.
I therefore appreciate you so eloquently expressing exactly how it works.
I worked at a company that constantly struggled to be profitable. They’d make an decision to hire an employee, but the current work culture was so ingrained that it was nearly impossible to bring in anyone new. So then people would churn through and leave… and their work had to be picked up by other people, because at that point the CEO would decide that it was better to save money. It was a horribly vicious cycle. “Promising to backfill” is a game so many companies play.