what's something your company did that totally killed morale?

"Remember those 3 years of 100% remote work during the COVID pandemic, where we broke record renevue 3 years in a row? Yeah, we need you back at the office twice a week. Why? Because we said so."

Sure, boss.

This just happened:

• Wife was promoted to a managment position in the company 1 year ago.
• Was given a list of things they wanted her to accomplish.
• She not only checked off ever item on the list, but exceeded the expectations, sometimes by 10,000% and way faster then they expected.
• Told weekly by her boss how impressed they are, and how great she is doing, and how much of an asset she is.
• A meeting with the management team was held a month ago (mid August). Wife was not invited, despite being part of that team.
• Merit raises are given out every year, between 3% and 10% depending on performance, wife finds out yesterday (9/21/23) that she is only getting the 3%.

I'm more pissed then she is, and I don't want to fight with her about it, but if it was me, I'd have quit on the spot.

A year into COVID they had an all hands where they congratulated us on exceeding our productivity goals after a year of WFH. Then they announced that everyone was gonna have to come back to the office, and that because a different OU screwed up and got their dicks sued off there wasn't any money in the incentives budget and not to expect much in the way of bonuses that year.

Edit: ooh forgot to mention that a bunch of us pushed back because we didn't think it was safe yet, we got overridden by upper management, then after we came back in our state set a record for daily new COVID cases and daily deaths. It swept through the office, a bunch of my coworkers got really sick and one lady's husband died.

A few months after our company got acquired the new HR rep came to our city for a pep talk. The highlights of which included:

• We're trying to jack up the value of this company as fast as possible at the expense of all of you
• If you like the idea of job security this isn't the company for you

Those weren't her exact words, of course, but that's what everyone took away from it. I had already given notice at this point.

I've seen it 3 times. So now if a company I work at sells to another company, I quit.

When this happens, senior staff get layed off. The hard workers finally get the promotion they've been slaving for and never getting!*

*The hard workers are now middle management. Big company is trying to leverage their social standing in the company to deliver their morale killing new standards.

Hard workers will 'underperform,' even if they don't. They'll be replaced by someone the new parent company hires. (likely the wayward son of one of their VCs)

Nobody will like this person. They don't know anything about how the company used to work, and they're going to tell you how all the changes are gonna be great.

This will widen the divide between senior management and the 'boots on the ground.' The remaining talent that didn't get promoted and fired or played off will find new work. Soon your company will be a few dozen 20-somethings making $18/hr to do a job that you used to get paid $75k/yr to do.

All for the shareholders.

Edit: if this is your current situation, just bail. You're not being setup for a career. You're being set up to be taken advantage of.

Lol I work for Unity

They routinely held an end of year meeting at the start of December that was a bit of a Christmas party. The meeting was always a show of appreciation that ended with the boss handing out bonus pay.

One year the boss finished thanking us for contributing to the busiest and most profitable year in company history. He then announced that all that big profit would be used to open up a new location! And for that reason nobody would be getting Christmas bonuses because the new location was really expensive. The next year he sold to a corporation who immediately fired most of the senior staff due to their high salaries, myself included.

Told everyone that they needed to be in the office a minimum of three days a week. Everyone lost their shit and now they're grumpy and combative all the time. Used to be a chill place to work.

When I worked in the convention industry, my boss quit a few weeks before an event and I had to absorb his workload. I worked 6am-11pm 3 days in a row and on the 4th morning I passed out on the floor and was taken to the hospital.

HR accused me of being hungover despite not even having time to get drunk the night before. They banned alcohol at work events.

I'm not a big drinker so...whatever. But of course the rumor spread and everyone silently blamed me.

Then a year later a new coworker forcibly kissed me several times at an event. I was planning on quitting anyway so I didn't report it but a different coworker did on my behalf after I asked her not to. HR told me it was my fault ("If you knew she was a messy drunk, why were you with her?") and signed me up for a sexual harassment seminar because "clearly [you] don't know what sexual assault is."

I regret not suing for the second one but I just wanted to put that job behind me.

Docked an hour of our pay because, after we'd caught up on all of our tasks and had no chores or customers to handle, we played a bit of cards in the gift shop office to kill a bit of time. Corporate didn't like that we weren't doing stuff, despite the fact that we had literally nothing else to do, so they retroactively took away an hour of our pay.

I've already emailed the labor board about this since, looking into it, pay can only be docked before the time is worked, not after.

Well the CEO just had a massive panic attack yesterday and said there's no way we're going to finish this major project in time and the company is now ruined. The company is only one person. It's me.

Former employer Introduced a bonus system that reduced the amount of the bonus for everyone for each costly mistake. Each bonus check came with a slip of paper that named the department, the mistake, and the amount deducted.

Boss couldn't understand that attaching an arbitrary name, shame, and punishment scheme took away all of the bonus's power to make everyone happier.

We were looking to replatform our aging e-commerce site.

With management approval, we spent weeks researching and narrowed it down to two possibilities - Magento 2 and Sylius.

We then divided our team in half. Half of us took one possible platform, the rest took the other. Each team was given an identical list of tasks, and the goal was to implement as much of the list as we could in two weeks.

At the end of the period, the Sylius team had not only completed every single item on the list, but had so much extra time they were able to implement some cool “nice to have” features we’d always wanted on the site but never had time for.

The Magento2 team didn’t even get the software fully installed and working much less even start chipping away at the list.

We all met and stacked hands - Sylius was the way we were gonna go. We were a big enough fish that we even got the company that made the software to commit to flying one of their developers out to our office and working alongside us.

Then the company put us all into a room and told us the decision would be Magento2 - now come to that agreement.

3/4 of our team left within 2 months.

I used to work in an animation studio, and one day the boss came down and said he had a zoom meeting booked with some LA producer who wanted to hear a pitch from us, and he needed ideas. So the whole room of animators all started pitching up ideas and it went super well, and after about an hour we had this idea that had us rolling on the floor that we all loved and the boss seemed really happy. So he went upstairs and got on zoom, but didn't close the door so we could all hear him talking from our desks. He didn't mention our idea at all, just pulled something out of his ass that sounded awful, which if it had been accepted we'd have to work on for the next year or so. Luckily they weren't interested, but yeah we didn't really pitch ideas with much gusto (is at all) after that.

Promoted several top performers. To fill the vacancy left from this, they then hired several incompetent, inexperienced people to fill the leftover roles, who unsurprisingly underperformed.

Well then wouldn’t you know it, our profitability went down.

So then they start several rounds of layoffs where they fired all of the top performers who had been promoted accusing them of, ironically enough, poor performance for the first time in their entire career at the company.

Throughout the entire process the same people who were eventually fired were reassured they were safe.

The underperforming idiots still work here, they just shifted some of their responsibilities on to other people like me in other departments so they have less room to fuck up.

The cherry on top of that which most of the company doesn’t know is that they considered firing the under-performers and demoting the people who were promoted instead of firing them, but they thought it would make us look poorly run in front of our clients.

Oh and they froze our yearly raises and bonuses, meanwhile our CEO got a raise even while making more than double the average for a CEO of a company our size (8 figures).

When the former boss had to quit due to health reasons, we got a two-faced lying PITA instead. He was an overall unpleasant employer in the first place, but the final nail in the coffin for the cashiers was that he demanded from them that they have to make sure customers stay 6 feet apart from each other during Covid.

• If we didn't pester everyone in line to keep their distance, we got shouted at in front of the customers for "not doing our job". Customers that didn't want to obey the rules after being asked nicely were automatically our fault.

• If we DID try to enforce the policy, a lot of customers went to the front desk to complain about it, he did a 180° turn every time, apologized to the customers and handed out coupons. The more drama they caused, the bigger they were rewarded for it, and the cashier was chewed out for doing what HE wanted them to do.

If you have the choice between "wrong" and "worse" and you WILL get shouted at for both, there is no room left for morale.

All hands meeting … “show of hands, who's been here less than a year?”…”you're all top notch, the best candidates from the best schools… we couldn't get that caliber employee years ago!” [suggesting those who built the business to that level were what, inferior - including the VP that just said it?]

It was meant as a compliment to the new folks…but it fell FLAT.

They fired the social butterfly of the group. He was always good company. Most of us in the office were pretty quiet people but he knew how to bring us out of our shell. He would often organize lunch so we can all hang out together but there was a lot less of that when they got rid of him.

Upper management told us to stop clocking in a minute early, then accused us all of time theft.

They hired full time the contractor who brought down prod 3 times in his 6 month contract. I updated my resume that very day. Edit:spelling

Fired several workers and made the rest of us do their jobs, too.

Also, the owner coming in every day to argue with our head baker about how to run a bakery. The owner had no previous bakery experience; the entire company was a pet project and her main business was in finance.

I can tell you something that brought up our morale. Our director was removed. Everyone's morale and attitudes improved immediately. The in-fighting and pain-in-the-assery dissolved.

About a year before, a committee was formed to try and figure out ways to improve morale in our areas. Lots of good ideas were brought up, some were implemented. Morale stayed the same.

Had anyone known that removing of our director was on the table, every single person would have voted for that.

And the week before that, my inept foreman quit. That was the best Friday to Friday I ever had.

Remove all the walls and cubicles. Get all the desks as close together as possible to create empty space.

They cut our pay twice and promoted an inexperienced manager all the while telling us how much we sucked.

They hired a fixed ops manager who wanted to change the "culture" of the maintenance department. What he meant was he would penalize us for not meeting certain metrics while simultaneously posting our production to make us compete against one another. People quit. Don't think they're open anymore.

This happened a few years ago at my old workplace. We had gotten more docs to process and as a result ended up getting behind the normal timeframe to process them. We have a meeting where management basically told us that we couldn't talk to our coworkers about non-work stuff while on the clock/not on break. Basically they were blaming socializing as the reason why we were behind. This did not go over well with anyone. This was also the same meeting where management lectured us about keeping our desks cleaned, which made it even worse.

Laid-off all the people who actually interacted with the customers. Among other problems, this meant that we no longer got any data about customer experience problems. The next version of the product was built largely on upper management's personal opinions rather than data. It did not work.

Hyping all of us up for a big "Chinese New Years" bonus for months, only to turn around and give each employee a $1 bill and a printed piece of paper about how much they """appreciated""" us. Like, at that point just don't even bother.

Edit for more info: American business with Chinese immigrant owners.

Last year we got a new GM. The first thing she said was "everyone is coming into work 5 days a week". We lost every one of our senior staff in under a year and the rule was never enforced anyway. We're back 2 and 3 office and home again now.

Every year, my company (non-profit, medical field, about 1200 employees) used to send all employees a $10 gift card as a holiday bonus. Not great, but still something. During COVID lockdown, this stopped because revenue took a massive hit. All of Administration (C-Suite, department heads and their seconds and secretaries) went work-from-home. As the remaining employees were customer-facing, they were deemed "essential" and expected to step up with new policies and procedures and a rapidly dwindling support from Admin. Evaluations and raises were put on hold for everyone until they could be sure all outstanding debts and liabilities were covered. Admin pelted the essential workers with numerous appeasement emails about how we need to band together, be resilient, and pull through. All the while they were putzing around at home, not responding to requests for more supplies or direction on how we were supposed to handle COVID-related situations. Several rounds of mass layoffs occurred. Morale was at an all-time low, but the services we provided greatly helped the community, and the essential employees pushed ahead for them, not the company.

Fast forward 2 years later and we start to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Evaluations were going to be re-instituted that year and we were going to be getting our bonus back. We were explicitly told that the bonuses would be bigger than before as a recognition of the hard work and dedication of the essential staff through COVID. Around the beginning of the evaluation period, the CEO sent an email to everyone in the company that destroyed any remaining amount of goodwill the essential employees had. All employees could only receive a MAXIMUM of 2% increase as a result of their evaluation. Most people would only get .5 or 1%. And that bonus we were getting? Was a $30 store credit to their newly announced company-branded apparel and equipment store. The kicker - the store credit didn't even cover the cheapest item available for purchase (a blanket with the company logo stitched on the corner). So no matter what, you were having to pay money out of your own pocket to get anything. Everyone went ballistic. We all had a feeling that Admin was putting massive amounts of pressure on the essential workers to get them to quit and not pay severance, but this pretty much confirmed it. The exodus still occurred and it totally worked out in Admin's favor.

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Nothing says "fuck you guys, in particular" like laying off the chef that cooked lunches for us in the office, even through COVID, and using the money to hire a an offshore Indian team (whom we were now unofficially responsible for managing, obviously)

Working in a hotel restaurant, they mentioned offhandedly that the restaurant lost $10K every month, but that didn't matter because we were there not to make money, but as an amenity for the hotel guests.

Probably meant to make us feel secure on our jobs as business slowed; actually made us feel like we didn't matter and the hotel didn't care about how busy we were. Like, we got paid by the hotel but the majority of our income was still tips, and tips are based on sales, so the hotel not caring about our sales meant they didn't care about our income, either.

I wasn't there much longer.

Previous job. They sold off our main product in one industry so they could focus on the more demanding other product for another industry. The first product end users actually wanted. The second product, end users did not want it, but the manufacturers did... because it gave them all that wonderful spying on you data to sell. Then the company died during the shutdowns. The stupid apps they gave people didn't entice anyone to use them.

They killed the canteen. The food went from bearable to shit. That was their way of nudging employees to quit.

After a single week of (relatively) low sales, the company slashed our labor by a third. Lost a lot of good people because we simply weren't allowed to schedule them. The skeleton crew that did remain was left to deal with the (surprise surprise) massive influx of business we received in the following two months. Did they ever give us they labor back? Negative. Now we're left dealing with 1.3x the business with 0.6x as much staff. Staff who are necessarily less stellar than their predecessors.

God, I'm tired of buying other people's boats

Followed government pay guidelines and froze pay for 12 fucking years.

Gave the C suite the highest performance rating possible after laying off like 20% of employees.

Pretty sure if any employees of oceangate are on here they will win this one. Their boy Stockton speedran that shit.

Told us that we'd have to work long hours for the next two months, and then when questioned, said that things were only going to get tougher.

Company started a commission structure promotion for an upsell add-on. Two weeks in they retroactively changed the commission to decrease the payout. Most people didn't realize this but I did the math and showed every manager I knew that if this wasn't fixed they would destroy all integrity in any future sales programs and people would start jumping ship. Told them that I would be among the first and that thanks to having half the local office on my Facebook friends list I would have zero issues telling everyone why.

With very little fanfare and no apology they reversed the new policy within three days, record speed for a company that size. One of the managers pulled me aside to let me know they couldn't say anything previously but I was absolutely right. I told them they were a spinless coward* for not saying anything earlier but I understood the need to protect their paycheck.

After that I mentioned to the people that would have been most impacted that they dodged a bullet and they didn't know what I was talking about. I explained the change and unchange. They double checked the math and were pissed that they didn't see the scam earlier. Most of them were gone within a few months because they didn't trust the company anymore even though the company fixed it.

• this person learned very quickly that I would read the birthday card and toss it in the trash. They started signing them with "you can throw this away now". They once said they really appreciated that I never once even pretended to not tell the truth.

I'll never forget the day they wheeled the beer fridge out of the office.

Hired a contractor to lead the IT department. Months later, said contractor outsourced us to another company and promptly left.

They didn't even have the guts to do it themselves.

I work retail in a place which was a pretty chill. But lately management has been making minute changes, tiny ones to solidify their management dynamic. We used to wear any hats we wanted (provided they were tasteful and didnt have a competing brand but everything else was fair) but now we can't wear any headware. We used to wear personal pins, and yes some of us were a little political in our pin choices, but mostly it was happy fun nerd nonsense. But the pins had to go. Then visible stickers on things. So basically you come to work in only company designated attire now. They are also making changes to how we can personalize our breakroom which is a long tradition in the company.

Limiting how many positive yearly reviews managers are allowed to give out. Not M$ but glad it's finally in the news. The employees find out how the system works fast, no matter how secret they tried to keep it.

Meetings.

Two layoffs in 3 months, totaling more than half the company.

Installed tracker on our phones, trucks and Verizon dashcam tattlers

Defending the workers who are always screwing up, so us who have to fix their problems don’t see any hope for change

Furlough team for one week

Pitting colleagues against each other in a game of metrics

I haven't gotten a raise in 10 years (since I turned 50). In fact, switching jobs often resulted in a decrease in salary. From 2018 to today, counting inflation, my effective salary has dropped over 30%.

And no, I'm not mediocre at my job. At one Major Internet Monopoly I wrote a script to refactor several million lines of code, to remove redundancy in some autogenerated structs, with only one major outage that I fixed in a few hours. I than proceeded to modify a data display and write a coefficient calculation engine for an inhouse experiment that ended up saving them tens of thousands of dollars. After the experiment I leveraged the ML platform to generate reports for the data scientists in hours, where they were prepared to take weeks. My evaluation for that period? One step below Meets Expectations.

At another Major Internet Monopoly I basically implemented a major feature to the mobile app, while still in my 90 day onboarding period. Under extreme schedule pressure. And while the other engineers "helpfully" redesigned my code in code review. Once I missed a release cycle because a reviewer blocked my submission because I forgot to add a period at the end of a comment. I'm still burned out from that one.

I'm at a much better company now, at $10k below the Major Internet Monopoly above. In 2 years I got one 5k bonus, but still no raise. And we're a startup struggling with the current economy fuckery, so no real point asking for a raise.

Sorry, that was 3 things.

CTO wanting to replace all.software with that of his buddies CTO being touchy touchy with the employees

Promoted my boss into his current position.

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Had a "tech company" that relied on ad revenue and freely flowing venture capital to amass a bunch of users. Then both funding sources dried up. I randomly picked one part of our company and tried monetizing it without letting anyone know ahead of time.

Oh, boy, now we have no users, no money, and all the remaining devs of (Insert the name of your most hate tech company from this year) hate me.