Their idea was to mandate all cameras being on for every meeting because the lack of cameras is definitely why we all hate working here.
It's like I was talking to an alien, I explain the long work hours, the constant cutting of staff, ever increasing micromanagement and forced to be in a shitty office WHERE WE CAN'T EVEN GET A DESK COS ITS TOO BUSY. Constant layoffs constant breathing down our necks and never ending barrage of meetings where concerns raised for not being able to do any work during the FUCKING WORK DAY is just addressed with a shrug and inference that we should do work out of hours to make time for literal pointless self felating meetings filling up every day.
I explain how the last year was constant never ending crunch while we lose half our team to outsourcing and have to take on 10x more responsibility when we were already understaffed doing the original job. I explain how all planned upcoming work is continued crunch. How we have single people holding up massive systems solo while somehow half of the team is going off to seminars and doing literally fuck all and THEY GET PROMOTED INTO MANAGEMENT. I explain how the size of the team doing any actual real work is 10% the size of the leadership fucking swarm we have of useless idiots who pack every day with meetings just to feel useful. I explain how the answer to every single problem or blocker we face is just "work harder and longer" while they insult everyone in meetings by crying how no one gives feedback and they're "here to help"
The answer? Oh we should be turning our cameras on and put even more meetings in for forced fun sessions...........
Fucking managers
my last place was toxic and dysfunctional as hell. the institution had/has problems, but my department was known for being a disaster and had been as long as I was there (10 years), but getting worse every year. the institution would do employee surveys and the story was always the same: cannot retain talented and valuable staff, the routine loss of institutional knowledge was brutal.
the boss's solution to this was to give more salary bumps to the middle management tier (that drove people away) and to ignore staff reporting documented, verifiable bullying by middle management of junior staff.
it was so bad that they brought in a new middle manager with huge salary and initial offer with promises of full autonomy for selecting and running his team. he left after six months, once he realized how fucked and incompetent everyone else at his level was. and how shit the support staff were treated. the boss was completely embarrassed by how obviously unrecoverable the situation had become.
the boss would blame COVID and work from home as "destroying the culture" of the department and kept trying to force us all back into the office all the time, but all that did was turn the turnover rate up even higher. ultimately the inability to acknowledge reality and the tolerance of bullying induced me to fundamentally re-evaluate my professional life's trajectory and repeatedly apply elsewhere until I got something better, far enough away that I could sever my association.
I think there's a distinction between an organization operating in the neoliberal / capitalist ideological soup that still endeavors to adapt and function within those constraints based on information, and an organization that refuses to even acknowledge reality at a basic level or protect people from trauma for which the organization could be held liable. these are very fundamental requirements of an organization at least trying to preserve itself. nothing about me leaving was honestly heroic... I was just another rat fleeing a sinking ship captained by an aggressively incompetent fool who would go down shifting blame onto whatever he could.