I can’t give more approval for this woman, she handled everything so well.
The backstory is that Cloudflare overhired and wanted to reduce headcount, rightsize, whatever terrible HR wording you choose. Instead of admitting that this was a layoff, which would grant her things like severance and unemployment - they tried to tell her that her performance was lacking.
And for most of us (myself included) we would angrily accept it and trash the company online. Not her, she goes directly against them. It of course doesn’t go anywhere because HR is a bunch of robots with no emotions that just parrot what papa company tells them to, but she still says what all of us wish we did.
(Warning, if you’ve ever been laid off this is a bit enraging and can bring up some feelings)
They kept bringing up performance metrics. So are the metrics predetermined to always be against employees? Employees will never have a good performance regardless of all the positive feedback, just so the company can fire people when they want or need and say “well here’s your performance based on the metrics, you’re not working out so we gotta let you go”. That’s what it sounds like to me.
It’s kinda like speed limits set so low they know nobody will comply. Then they can “generously” not pull us over most of the time, and whenever they want to, they’ve always got “speeding” as a reason.
A mis-calibrated rule that is never enforced, until it is for other reasons, is just arbitrary despotism pretending to be a system of rules.
As soon as you start measuring metrics, you can expect to see a lot of people playing to the metrics, regardless of what they are. No metrics can really cover everything the company actually needs to accomplish to succeed. The people who focus on getting the necessary shit done can often end up looking bad if the metrics are especially off.
Performance metrics are always set against the employee. The company always wants the option to fire so metrics are set higher than possible. So if you ever meet metrics your probably cheating and that’s fireable itself. It’s all rigged.
Damn, why can’t these corporate idiots recognize the value of morale? Like, there are reasons to tell the truth that go beyond naïveté. If you’re fair with your employees, they fucking love you, and do so much better.
It’s like mosquitos vs wolves, r-type vs k-type strategies. There’s a whole different universe of getting ahead that has to do with bringing value and playing fairly, and so much upper management just seems totally blind to it.
I think people without conscience don’t understand what morale is. I think they understand motivation, but not morale.
Because they only thing they value is money. Right now money, not future money. So long as the numbers go up, the sociopaths in the c suite couldn’t possibly give fewer shits.
Well, the value fear and desire. They just don’t comprehend morale because it’s outside of their emotional universe.
As in, they don’t understand it. They don’t realize there’s something missing from their model of how people operate.
Technically, if your boss supports you and likes you, and so do your other co-workers, then you’re practically immune to being fired. There really isn’t such a thing as performance-based firing, it’s more that you weren’t able to play the game as well as someone else. If you’re not liked as a person, it doesn’t matter how great your performance is unless you’re a genius—everyone has room for improvement. So performance-based firings are a problem for people with mid IQ or mid EQ, which is mostly everyone (me included). I haven’t been fired, yet but nothing to say it won’t happen in the future.
Even if the employer wasn’t a total piece of shit, metrics should be able to cover the gamut of performance outcomes.
It’s pretty easy to weaponize that though. The whole industry is already more than capable of producing tight deadlines for no particular reason.
Personally I prefer just a binary acceptable or unacceptable. Instead of handling merit-based increases, You do merit-based promotions. I always hated the here’s the unreachable goal to get your full raise crap.