The Value of Employees

I have worked at a number of jobs in my career. Each organization had an collective attitude on the value of employees. Most were somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. The employees were taken care of, but I didn't feel any special focus.

Two jobs were special in that the companies seemed to take special interest in taking care of their employees on one hand and took no interest at all on the other. The way each company made me feel was obviously significantly different. One made me feel like a faceless cog and the other made me feel valued and appreciated.

Bad Example

At this company things were going a little rough. It was the 2008 time frame and the economy was not playing well with others. They needed to cut costs because sales were down so they started laying people off. Now layoffs are necessary sometimes. However, over the roughly three years I was there they had six rounds of layoffs. Basically every six months. That really destroyed moral. No one felt like they were safe. No one could plan ahead. It was rough. What was worse though was the company hired people between every round of layoffs. I remember being in a meeting where they talked about needing to hire over 100 engineers in the next few months. There were layoffs two months later. It made me think the leadership of the company had no idea what they were doing.

The worst thing about it all though, was the fact that it made me feel like we as employees were nothing but numbers to the company leadership. Fungible assets that could be purchased and disposed of as needed to meet the quarterly financial goals. It was demoralizing.

Good Example
The program I am currently on will be ending sometime around the end of this year. The site I work at will not close at that point, but it will see a significant reduction in the number of people working here. That means jobs are going away. However, unlike the bad example the leadership put together town hall meetings with 20-30 people in each one for everyone on the sight at the end of last year. In the meetings they told us their plans for scaling the site down and that a lot of jobs where going away. They gave us a whole year warning. That says to me they value us. Then in those meetings they opened the floor up for questions and concerns. That showed me they were listening. Then they said that they wanted all of us to tell our managers what we wanted to do whether it was to stay at the site after the program was over or move to a different job immediately. They showed me they cared about what we wanted. Then they said they would try their best to help everyone do what they wanted.

It has been a few months since those meetings and everything I have seen points to them really trying to follow through on those promises. I am not sure if all the upper leadership in my company are like my site director, but at the very least he has won my respect, and he has made me feel like my company cares about its employees as people. I never want to leave (the company, southern Maryland is... meh).

Conclusion
I don't know what the deal was with the bad example company, but they made a lot of poor choices. The good example though made good choices, and those choices, as best as I can tell, didn't cost them anything. They were up front, honest, transparent, and sympathetic. They are addressing a difficult transition for what it is and not hiding or ignoring it. I'm sure it has led to some difficult choices and conversations for the leadership, but not half as difficult as they would have been if they told us what was happening at the end of THIS year.