Other things management does to support mental health:
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Advise you to take up yoga/meditation
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Advise you to try to disconnect from work despite being on-call
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Advise you to seek therapy despite offering no benefit/money for this
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What’s pip?
Performance Improvement Plan.
It is basically the way a lot of companies fire for mild incompetence.
It is basically the way a lot of companies fire for mild incompetence.
Or their justification for firing you even with stellar performance reviews. I’ve seen it misused dozens of times now.
Or their justification for firing you even with stellar performance reviews. I’ve seen it misused dozens of times now.
I don’t know how common it is, but it definitely is common enough to poison the well. I had to initiate a real, legitimate PIP for a report once. Them being an “unproductive expense” was not a problem for me - if corporate had a problem with that, I had a list of upper management they should excise first - but their shitty work was hurting the morale of the team. They had to improve, and it was serious.
Of course since they took PIP as code for “illegal firing excuse”, the trust and cooperation needed for a PIP to work was practically impossible.
In small businesses, the budget is so tight that the owner really can’t afford workers, so the worker - employer relationship is antagonistic.
In publicly owned businesses, shareholder primacy dictates every penny spent on a worker is a penny not going to shareholders, so the worker - employer relationship is antagonistic.
I imagine somewhere in between might be an intermittant sweet spot where proprietorships and partnerships could actually regard human workers as human beings, but I’ve only rarely seen them wink in and out of existence like quantum particles.
I work for a corporation and my org takes care of us pretty well. Going to bat for us vs HR kind of well.
On the flip side, when they need us we show up and bust our asses.
Your circumstances might be an outlier, and it may not be a permanent situation if your company is bought out or management changes, or we undergo another economic crisis like the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008.
Oh, definitely. We’re a relatively small org and most management has come up from the floor.
If you don’t want antagonism between employee and owner remove the unnecessary element: the owner(s). Thusfar I’ve found the matter of perverse incentives and antagonistic relationships in companies to be only a matter of how hard one looks. They’re always there, it’s only a matter of how visible they are and how far the observer is willing to go to see them.
I would put it more that small business owners can’t always afford employees who aren’t willing to make the same sacrifices as they are for the good of the business. Also management can be hard, especially if it is your first time doing it; a lot of new managers follow the generational trauma of poor management they had when they were being managed.
Part of the problem is the public labor pool is forced by circumstances to choose among a limited selection of shitty jobs. Note the form - résumé - interview process that is grueling, also the one-sided contracts by which workers are routinely stripped of rights (such as NDAs to cover up OSHA violations and workplace abuse). So our small businesses are accustomed to a bedraggled pool that they can overwork, underpay and trample without consequence.
I’ve also observed we don’t take management seriously, hence the commonplace of toxic management or executives who behave childishly and expect administrators to handle their outbursts even as it detracts from running the company. A manager is (in my understanding, say like a coach or a commanding sergeant) develop an awareness of their crew and how best to utilize their strengths and approach them to preserve morale. But few places consider managers this way, rather being a manager is (allegedly) a reward for doing well as a lower-rung worker.
An NDA cannot be used to cover up a crime. A manager may threaten a lawsuit, but the courts have been clear regarding issues like OSHA.
And management is totally a skill independent of doing the job, but it is really hard to find people good at it.
While that may be the case legally companies are good at bluffing about just how powerless they want you to believe that you are. You’ve had the legally protected right to discuss your wage with your coworkers for longer than any still-living member of my family has been alive… and yet they’ll happily tell you, off record, that it’s a violation of some policy or another to exercise that right.
A “performance improvement plan.” Basically a way for employers to set unrealistic expectations and fire the employee with less risk of a lawsuit for wrongful termination. Although since almost every state has “at will” employment now, it hardly seems necessary.
This exact scenario actually happened to me, including the PIP.
