“Layoff rumors spread faster than the speed of light within a company...............................”
There are two groups you need to treat well in a company. The maintenance staff and the boss’ assistant. The first lets you do stuff that’s technically outside your control. The second lets you see the layoff list long before it hits the regular employees. Or, at the very least you can find out if your name is on it.
One of my coworkers, a terrible employee but a nice guy was about to get married, buy a car and a house. I told him he was on the list. He asked his boss, and his boss assured him he was not. He got married, bought the house and the car and got laid off. He lost the house and the car. At the very least a decent boss would have said, “I don’t know but it would be wise to not make any big financial decisions until you know for sure.” But quite often it isn’t the decent man who becomes the boss.
TRUE DAT!
At a company I worked for thirty-plus years ago, approximately 1000 employees, a couple of us guys in my department wanted to see how fast a rumor could spread within the company.
So we came up with a plan: Start a ‘rumor’, fake of course, that there was a UNION ORGANIZER attempting to start an employee union, without naming the person and see how long it would take for the rumor to get back to us.
Now, this company was spread out over 4 large buildings, some miles apart, and we had access to all of them because of our jobs.
We started the ‘rumor’ in all buildings and it did not take but less than a day to get the feedback we sought.
The ONE THING WE DID NOT COUNT ON, WAS THAT THE ‘RUMOR’ WE SPREAD WAS ACTUALLY TRUE!
About mid afternoon of the day we started the rumor, a co-worker, same department as us but different workgroup, came into our lab and he was manic, to say the least.
He told us he was a union organizer and was attempting to start a union at our company and the news had spread like wildfire around the company! He could not understand how it had happened so fast! To this day he has no idea what we did.......
Anyways, the union never did get started, even though they held meetings at a local hotel and people attended, from all buildings, but no one was interested enough to start the proceedings to get them into the voting stages.............
I remember back in the early ‘70s the XYZ manager came in one morning and looked at the bulletin board. On it was a memo from HR announcing his replacement.