B.S. I have been in the corporate/financial world for over 30 years, and I have seen a tendency for employers to continually add to the workload of exempt employees...and why not, if they don’t have to pay them? I have known many people who worked extra hours because that’s what it took to do the extra work, NOT because they were incompetent, loiterers, blah, blah, blah.
It’s this kind of behavior that gives rise to law suits and unions (which I loathe). If employers want to avoid those odious outcomes, they need to be conscious of maintaining equity with their employees.
The regularly expressed attitude of “just find another job if you don’t like what’s going on” is simply not in the best interests of the employer (not to mention the employee). Historically, employees and employers take as much advantage as each other as they can get away with, and to posit that employers are always the ones with pure motives is silly. If employers aren’t proactive in maintaing a fair posture with their employees they will expose themselves to legal action, unionization, and at the very least the continued cost of turnover. I say that as a member of management, but you just gotta live in the real world.
One thing that companies should never do is hire time consultants. We did at Sara Lee and it was a disaster for management. The FIRST thing they recommended was that we cut the number of meetings. It sounds good but meetings are a chance for managers to preen and demonstrate their authority. There was never any need for technical people (like me) to be there. I was one of the people who left every day at 5PM. The difference between me and the people who left at 7PM was that I never attended meetings. My time was completely spent on productive work. My cowowrker was the same way. Every other department had 5 programmers and we only had two. Later it changed to one. We were able to do that because we sat at our desk and worked.
When I went to a larger company, we had to endure 3 hour meetings with 40 people in the meeting. 40 people!!! You can’t do anything with 40 people in a room. We ended up getting coworkers to page us out on our beepers so we could go back to work.
You must be a very good manager, your observations are spot on.
“The regularly expressed attitude of “just find another job if you don’t like what’s going on” is simply not in the best interests of the employer (not to mention the employee).”
Unfortunately, the management of many companies doesn’t care about that - only making the bottom line look as good as possible at the end of the quarter, even if it kills the company in the longer term. In such an environment, what else can an employee do but move on?