All Hands Attrition
Who’s first into the lifeboats from the sinking ship of mandatory all hands meetings? Senior management of course!
We’ve all been there¹, called into some dire office or other to attend what are bizarrely termed “all hands” or “town hall” meetings at the behest of the usual “gentle reminder” from the head of HR.
Meetings whose titles suggest some kind of co-operative structure, a kind of corporate communism where the proletariat actually has a voice in company operations — but, you all know how it really is.
These meetings are the modern day equivalent of arming a medieval town crier with a submachine gun and having a carefully hidden HR observer with a set of powerful binoculars hidden in a tall building noting down who’s present and, more pertinently, who is not.
If anything, these gatherings are now even more insidious as we emerge from the other side of the recent pandemic as many employees now thankfully work from home, gaining a fair degree of their own sanity, time, and money back in the process — much to the chagrin of middle-management.
Thusly, when summoned by the chief HR droid via their Outlook generated ChatGPT pseudo-prose² everyone scrambles to see if they’ve got any get out of jail free cards left in order to avoid the whole dreadful experience³.
