Cognitive Dissonance

[davidschroth]

So, a bit over 20% of my co-workers were told on May 5 that they were losing their jobs - some fraction immediately, and a larger fraction would be kept around to finish the product we're about to release. So, things have been weird, people have been finishing up their work, and the product was declared finished on Friday (a week early).

As is customary, the company announced that there would be a celebration of the new product release on June 3, which is two days before the termination date of the majority of the people who were laid off.

I suspect that the intent was good (road to hell, and all that), I can't escape feeling like the company is celebrating discarding valuable employees after squeezing what they wanted out of them.

Comments

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

It looks that way all right. The formula of project completion equals celebration is colliding with the non-formulaic situation.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

Sometimes one suspects that corporate HR departments are staffed with humanoid robots - they TRY to act human and nice, but their efforts are always just a little off.

I worked at a company once that held a much-vaunted Employee Appreciation Day - donuts and ice cream in the break room! Woohoo! Two days later they announced a huge layoff. Needless to say, future "Employee Appreciation Days" were met with skepticism, if not outright apprehension. My favorite part of that episode was that when the ice-cream was served they alerted us by playing marimba music
over the PA system.

[davidschroth.livejournal.com]

It's difficult to blame our corporate HR department, since most of our corporate HR was outsourced years ago...