Insight #292:
Why is it that when some companies are firing workers, other companies are scrambling to find workers? Because workers are the variable bits and pieces that managers manipulate in the name of work-flow fine tuning to enable executives to massage short-term profits to please stock analysts who have never even managed a company.
Which is how I became a member of a select club. The club of people who got dumped via cowardly email.
I joined the club some time ago. But every time I read a headline announcing “Company X has fired Y number of employees”, it all comes back to me. A local public radio station fired me. Okay, okay, it was from a non-paying gig. But it still hurt. After 10 years, they no longer wanted my twice-weekly Nonsense At Work radio pieces.
Why the hurt? After all, people have been firing people ever since Adam and Eve were kicked out of that garden. I’ll tell you why the hurt. Because they said goodbye to me before I said it to them, that’s why. It’s like that girl who broke my heart because she broke up with me before I could break up with her.
Goodbye only hurts when we are not ready to go.
My first break-up happened for one of three reasons. She no longer needed me. I did something wrong to upset her. A better hunk rode into town.
When the radio station fired me, they said that their new programming meant they no longer needed me. Adam and Eve got kicked out because they did something their boss did not like. As for that girl in my past, I know which reason applied to me. Which is why it still hurts, even though I no longer remember her clearly.
Unlike that girl, managers won’t tell you they have found someone better. (It’s too risky, legally speaking.) But why should they? Blaming job restructuring or reprogramming or inflation or the economy will get you gone with less embarrassment. And looks so much more managerial in an email.
Want to know a dirty secret? Layoffs are never really management’s fault. Unless you are Akio Morita, the co-founder of Sony. He once said, “If we face a recession, we should not lay off employees; the company should sacrifice a profit. It’s management’s risk and management’s responsibility. Employees are not guilty; why should they suffer?”
Welcome to my side of the nonsense divide.
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