The below is from The Onion. The company I work for will be merging with another company around calendar year end (as opposed to fiscal year end for those who understand and care). It is so accurate, I failed to even chuckle after reading it. Verisimilitude doesn’t even begin to describe the highlighted passage.
BOSTON—The staff of Viacom’s regional syndication and licensing division have “absolutely no idea” what is happening with their operations, planning, or corporate structure following their four-hour-long operations, planning, and corporate-restructuring meeting, employees said Monday. “Well, it seems like we are either heading into an ‘amazing new era,’ or losing our jobs,” assistant project coordinator Lisa Morgan said. "Or maybe it’s something else altogether. At the very least, I’m fairly sure that this meeting concerned how we operate, plan, and structure our work. I think." Morgan said she hoped some of the finer details of the meeting would be made clear in one of the follow-up meetings on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.
Rumor has it that managers in our group have been meeting with their people, but my manager has been on vacation so I don’t know anything yet. Truthfully, though, whatever it is I’m fairly certain it is too early for any major announcements to be made.
We’re expecting to hear something in the Nov - Dec time frame. Possibly not until a little later, though.
Interestingly, in my company raises are handed out more freely than information.
Well whatever comes of your company Raphael, I know you will be okay. You’re a smart guy who can look like he is real productive. That’s what managers look for when hiring. Sometimes change can be good too.
My wife is the type of person that frets everytime she gets called into the office by her manager. Sometimes it’s just to gossip, other times it’s praise but very very rairly is it anything to do with discipline. You would think she would be excited to go into her bosses office by now!
Ah! The Dilbert Effect is alive and well. Having spent nearly 30 years working for a large corporation, coming out of a planning meeting without the faintest hint of a plan is the norm. I guess it doesn’t matter where you work.
This, phlegm, I’m afraid is emphatically not so. I did, in fact, once have a manager who was fired while she was on vacation. Haven’t worked there in a while, so I don’t mind saying it was at consulting firm, Booz Allen & Hamilton. We were all shocked. She came back from the Bahamas to find she had no job. It was absolutely surreal. And brilliant consulting firm that they were, they had eliminated her position having us report to a non-librarian in HR, only to later realize that an HR person can’t run a library. They hired a new head librarian sometime after I bailed.
Thanks. Not likely though.
And for the record, since we are a lowly corporate center and the decisions are being made at a much higher level and the decisions are at least a few months away, nobody in our group is putting off vacations. But our management team, not known for long range planning, is collectively putting in a lot of effort to demonstrate the value of our group to the company as a whole.
One of the big problems is that we don’t yet have any real details about the similar group in the company we’re merging with and have only snippets about how we compare.
Sometimes change can be good too.