Member-only story
My Employer Told Me I Was Just a Number in a Cell on a Spreadsheet
They proved it 3 months later by laying me off
Along with 50 other colleagues.
This company rinsed and repeated this act one year later.
They’d already shown their lack of loyalty and disrespect for their employees, so why were another two dozen workers caught off guard, dismayed, and shocked when it happened to them?
Because they weren’t paying attention. Dysfunctional companies do a great job of isolating employees and teams from each other. This isolation leads to ignorance of what’s happening in different departments and builds a lack of empathy for those being mistreated or cut off.
Workers tell themselves that it can’t happen to them and stick their heads back in the sand—a dangerous position to take for one’s future well-being.
Because they lacked empathy for those who went first.
After two corporate layoffs, I learned that most people will forget about you in a few minutes. They assume they were more valuable to the company or had a better performance review, and that’s why they were saved.
And they would be assuming wrong.
