The List
OK, we are going to start with a list. Ready to be frustrated? Read through them and lets chat after.
“We’re experiencing higher than usual call volume. Your call is important to us.”
“Due to unexpected circumstances, our response time may be longer than usual. We appreciate your patience.”
"We are currently experiencing technical difficulties and are working diligently to resolve them. Thank you for your understanding.”
"We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the delay in our response. Rest assured, we are working to address your concerns as soon as possible.”
"While we were impressed with your qualifications, we have ultimately chosen a candidate who we believe is the best fit for the role.”
Triggered yet? Gosh, asking ChatGPT for a list of some triggering statements corporations provide to make us feel better was an awful idea. It also provided way more options but ooo the heebie-jeebies. Couldn’t list them all here.
Here’s the thing though. We’ve gotten used to it. We have officially given in to these vague promises, frustrating “terms” and corporate bullshit statements that woo us into a false view of “well hey, they are doing their best”.
Corporations know that. They can use these words to make us think they are doing their darnedest to get us the best service money can buy.
The Customer
As customers, we have choices. We can choose to move to a different service. Unless, well its one of the big ones. Intuit, Facebook, Google. Then we get stuck with what we are given and hope we can just “make it work”, with varying levels of success.
I think of one experience I had with the headlight on my car. I waited. I called. I begged. I had things to do, and places to be and didn’t want to wait months with a bad headlight. But what was I told? “We are trying our best, but we don’t have an ETA when a new headlight will be in.” Gosh. Waited almost EIGHT months before a new one arrived. But what could I do. No other third party sold that version of the headlight so I just had to wait. With all the tech , and “just in time” delivery notifications we have in place, how is it that I was being told “we don’t know when a new headlight will be in”. But hey, your business IS important to us. Talk about apathy that not a single employee could provide me with more information, or give me someone who was a little less apathetic to the problem their company created.
The Employee
Lets look at the flip side though, it’s probably not the employees fault. Lets look at what they have to deal with. Employees are being forced back to the office in droves, all to likely prop up the investment these businesses have put in their business locations. To the corporation, its “to create a better work culture”, or “to improve productivity.”
What I (and others see is it’s to get rid of headcount without having to pay for expensive layoff & [severance packages](https://www.businessinsider.com/google-tech-layoffs-earnings-impact-ai-search-revenue-2024-1#:~:text=The cost of cuts&text=The 2023 job cuts%2C which,costs don't stop there.). It’s gotten so bad, it’s even to the point of gaslighting employees into quitting because its cheaper. One day, your boss is telling you you’re doing an amazing job, keep it up, A+, exceeds expectations, then then the next day you’re unexpectedly on Performance Improvement Program because you’re not hitting your new KPIs, but in reality its because they need to reduce headcount.
We’ve already seen what these corporations did to our parents. For instance, previous employees found that Intel, while denying claims of age discrimination found that the average age of layoffs in 2016 was 49, 7 years older than the average age of employees still at Intel. By letting these employees go, Intel left many employees out of multiple hundreds of thousands of unvested stock claims, forcing them to work longer and harder than they had just to make up the loss of vested stock.
“Oh the Apathy”
What do those sweet talking words like “you’re important to us” or “we have ultimately chosen a candidate who we believe is the best fit for the role” or “here we’re family” mean anymore?
Why the hell should the employee care anymore? Why don’t they care anymore? Why should they care if he/she gets fired tomorrow? Why should we as lower or middle class citizens who are just trying to make a way in the world invest our lifeblood only to be fired because the beancounters found that we aren’t providing a high enough ROI or didn’t meet our KPIs (even though the company made record profit).
Or they found a new way to make the investors another million by laying off a portion of their employees for those sweet sweet short term gains before they inflate their golden parachute and float on over with another overcompensation packet to another business who’s profits “aren’t meeting expectations.”
Final Thoughts
If you as an employer want employees that produce better, listen to them. Don’t listen to the system you put in place to see if efficiency has gone down, or sentiment dropped but don’t really care as long as the money go brr.
Your future profits and innovative ideas will suffer. You’ll look out there for the next best idea and wonder where they all went. They went the way of the last long-planned innovative dollar you spent. Instead of focusing on making your current system more financially efficient, find ways to keep the employees who provided you with a long term goal & that sweet financial success around and support them. See them grow, and share the profits of the fruits of their labors. Empower them. Don’t only make them feel “part of the team” give them the autonomy, education & direction they need to make those sweet short term profits AND long term gains. Invest in them.
Humans are versatile beings that don’t need as much hand holding as you may think if you give them a common goal, resources, and financial investment to improve your business. They can also feel checked in more because they don’t feel that you are threatening their short term viability in purchasing a home. Getting a new car. Living life. Don’t gaslight them to think its their fault when it was your bad planning. Don’t let them get apathetic. Once you as a leader do, that sweet dollar is going to be a lot harder to get.
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