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I am currently in the middle of such an event. Small company, 30 persons. The CEO has an unnatural bond with the HR lady. She has shares of the company, and it is an open secret that he very much would like to fuck her.
As a result she gets more and more freedom and behaves as she is somehow entitled of being a second CEO. She is absolutely terrible in management, and has an unusual high amount of fluctuation in her department which covers everything which isnt operative business. So far, in the last 5 years the company hired and was left by six salespeople and no less than 10 team assistants. We usually have two sales jobs and two assistance jobs to fill. This situation alone does not help to keep up our morale.
The CEO keeps up a facade of "we are all family here" and therefore is quite open with announcements when someone new joins us and someone else leaves us. In the past week a newly hired Senior Account Manager quit after less than two weeks in the company. When he made the round of saying goodbye, he told everyone that he quits because he cant stand the management of HR Lady which is his boss.
Since the CEO wants to fuck her he is always somehow covering her faults and trying to hide her incompetence. However, when he announced that not the account manager quit, but instead was fired, since they "could not accept his way of doing the work", which was very obviously a blatant lie, this was the final straw.
Currently all senior employees are either searching for something new or have already written, printed and signed their notice letters.
Mine was quite personal to me.
Fairly small European IT department for a much larger Asian company. With about 30 offices in Europe. Worldwide something like £80 billion turnover.
1 x IT Director 1 x IT infrastructure manager 4 x Business Analysts / Programmers 2 x Infrastructure Analyst (me +1) who ultimately ran all of Euro 3 x Help desk with one manager
I worked well with the Infrastructure Manager. But he had to scale back his time so moved to a new role. It wasn't uncommon for us to do 16 hour days, but I was young and could handle it.
The assumption was they would promote the Help desk manager, which I was fine with. Instead they brought in a guy from the QA department.
Now I liked this guy to start with but it became apparent it wasn't going to work between us with in a couple of months.
So I went to the director and said I can't work for him. You need to do something or I'm going and so will my colleague. I gave him a month, the I'll start the hunt. Then I talked to the hr director, the md and my original boss who I regularly had status meetings with
I had done a lot to bring the IT provision forward in my 3 years there and gained a lot of respect in the company for it.
So nothing happened in that month and in my second week of looking I got a decent job offer. So I walked in the next day and handed the it director my resignation, promptly followed by my colleague and then two of the business analysts and one from the help desk. The only ones left were the really inexperienced or just plain useless ones.
HR call me in and I told them the story of me and the manager. How he had said to the Help desk Manager that it was me or him. That the director had decided to call my bluff so I decided I wasn't that valuable, so it was time to go.
They asked what they could do so I told them. Move this guy on, make the help desk manager the boss and I'll reconsider my resignation. But I can't talk for my colleagues. A couple of days later they show me a proposal to shuffle the manager. I said I'll on reconsider when I see it happen.
Nothing happened until two weeks before I was due to leave. Word gets back to head office in Asia that the IT department has resigned on mass. Now I spent a lot of time in head office and built a strong friendship with the chairman's daughter, still is a fairly good friend all these years later.
She flys over, in my final week and asks what happened. I tell her about the offer from hr but I hadn't seen any movement from them. She marches upstairs and talks to the md and hr director. Ten minutes goes by and I'm called into the MD's office to see the IT manager escorted from the building and asked if I want his job. Apparently he was offered early retirement but rumour had it they told he was being relocated to a different department and told them to shove it.
I declined the offer and said it wasn't about getting his job, I didn't want it and I wasn't mentally ready for it. The other guys weren't staying anyway as they had better offers. But my friend the help desk manager did get the job. I still left as the job was about the team and the amazing work relationship we had.
For the next two months they kept calling me with improved offers, I declined. It was never about the money but it was about listening to their staff. How could I work in a company that didn't value me until I came through with my promised consequence?
I've bumped into the hr manager at events since and the now it director (who was the help desk manager) and we often talk about the lessons learnt. It took them years to recover from IT department imploding.
Yeah, sounds familiar. For me its also not about the job in general. I like what i do, and i know that i'm good at it. I like my colleagues and am considering some of them being my friends.
It is about the somehow toxic atmosphere, the lies, and the behind-closed-doors murmurs despite "we are all family here".
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I'm not even mad. I thought about searching something new for longer time already, and since i have gotten some recruiter messages which look like i could almost double my salary, i take this whole story as a sign that this time i do it for real. I won't lose too much. All the colleagues i am considering my friends will stay my friends, since we have established regular happening DnD and MTG sessions. I work as a Cloud Engineer, so the tools and tasks at a new job will stay the same as well. So, why not?