Employers Killed Workplace Loyalty, Not Employees

We had a blizzard back in February, where the Philadelphia and South Jersey area got hammered with close to 20 inches, shutting highways down and leaving people stranded all across the area. It was the kind of storm where you look outside and immediately decide, “Yeah, fuck this, I’m staying home today.”

Most normal people understood that and stayed home.

Apparently, one of my clients didn’t get the memo.

I was talking to him about something unrelated, and he started going off about how almost his entire office called out like it was some coordinated act of sabotage against him personally.

He wasn’t just annoyed either, he went all-in. Calling them babies, lazy pieces of shit, saying nobody has any work ethic anymore. I let him get it out of his system, then I pointed out the obvious.

There’s two feet of snow on the ground, roads are closed, and your company sells office supplies. Nobody is dying because an order got delayed for a day or two. This isn’t emergency work, this isn’t critical infrastructure, it’s paper and pens. The world will keep spinning without it.

It didn’t matter. He pivoted right into the “back in my day” speech about taking the bus in snowstorms and how his dad (who started the company) never missed a day of work. Then he tells me, almost proudly, that he called all his managers into a meeting and chewed them out over it.

I won’t repeat what he supposedly said here, but if I was one of those managers, we wouldn’t be having a meeting anymore, we’d be having a problem.

I told him, in a toned down way, that maybe behaving like an angry jerk and disrespecting your employees isn’t the smartest move if you expect them to show up for you. He pauses, admits I might have a point, then immediately goes right back to trashing his employees like the conversation never happened.

That just goes to show you how disconnected some of these people are. You talk about your employees like they’re worthless, then expect them to risk their safety to come in and make you money. There’s no self-awareness there at all. Respect is a two-way street, but a lot of employers don’t seem to see it that way. If you treat your workers like they’re disposable, they’re going to act like the job is disposable. Then you take umbrage when nobody is willing to go above and beyond for you.

This mindset isn’t rare either, it’s everywhere.

Employers love to complain that nobody wants to work anymore, but what they’re actually seeing is people refusing to tolerate garbage conditions for garbage pay. I’ve watched this play out in real time at multiple jobs. The expectations keep going up, the pay stays the same, and the level of respect drops off a cliff. And management wonders why nobody is motivated.

At one of my old jobs, I was busting my ass to get my ever-increasing workload finished while watching someone else turn the place into their personal playground. When she wasn’t literally doing cartwheels on the manufacturing floor, she was flirting with guys who should’ve been working and recording videos for Instagram. She also happened to be a manager’s daughter, which tells you everything you need to know. Guess who got pulled aside and told they weren’t working hard enough? Here’s a hint, it wasn’t the person doing gymnastics in the middle of a shift.

Situations like that drain you fast. Once you realize effort doesn’t matter, you stop giving a shit. Not in some dramatic, walk-out-the-door kind of way, but in a quiet way where you simply stop caring about doing anything beyond what’s required to keep your job. You do what you have to do and nothing more. Management interprets that as laziness, but most of the time it’s a direct response to how the place is being run.

The biggest workplace scam is the idea that hard work gets rewarded.

In a lot of places, the reward for being reliable and efficient is more work, higher expectations, and zero increase in pay. You become the person everyone leans on while others coast, and you’re supposed to feel good about it. After a while, you realize that you’re just being used. Smart employees figure that out and adjust accordingly.

Then you’ve got managers who think their job is to babysit grown adults all day. Watching the clock, policing phones, tracking bathroom breaks like we’re back in grade school. If the work is getting done correctly and on time, none of that should matter. All this heavy-handed management does is create resentment and make people feel like they’re back in second grade instead of at a job. Nothing kills my motivation faster than being treated like I’m twelve years old.

I’ve always had a problem with that kind of authority. I don’t respond well to someone talking down to me, and I never have. Every time a boss tried it, I pushed back, and it usually led to problems for me. Most people don’t push back though. They just check out mentally and give you the bare minimum from that point forward. You don’t always see it right away, but it’s happening.

I always hear the same question from employers over and over again. “What’s a good cheap way to boost employee morale?” That word right there tells you all you need to know. Cheap. Not effective, not meaningful, not sustainable. Cheap. They’re looking for the lowest-cost way to get more out of people without actually giving anything back.

There’s always money for pizza parties, stupid social outings that cut into people’s personal time, or some other silly gimmick that’s supposed to “build culture.” But when it comes to paying people more or treating them better on a consistent basis, suddenly the budget gets tight. It’s ass-backwards, and people see right through it.

If you’re not going to pay more, the bare minimum you can do is show some level of appreciation.

Tell someone they did a good job when they actually did a good job. Thank people when they help you. Acknowledge the ones who are carrying more weight than everyone else. Not in some scripted, corporate way, just be genuine about it. That alone goes further than most of the nonsense companies try to pass off as morale boosters. And the best part is, it’s completely free.

At the end of the day, you can’t treat people like shit, underpay them, talk down to them, and then act surprised when they stop caring. Nobody is risking their safety in a blizzard for a job that doesn’t respect them. And honestly, if you’re running a business that way, you don’t deserve that level of effort in the first place.

Angry_Jerk

Adam “The Angry Jerk” Baker is the CEO of The AJnet Organization and Editor-in-Chief of AJnet Magazine. A grizzled internet veteran of over 20 years, he writes about politics, culture, and whatever else manages to annoy him that day.

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