Welcome to corporate America, where they fight for talent, compensate their people well, and then after twenty years of blood sweat and tears — and millions in the bank — abandon them midstream. Is that the perfect reward for the best people? A hatchet job to increase shareholder value, or eliminate positions or entire departments as cost cutting moves, to make the books look good? Is it acceptable to disrupt families and turn household budgets upside down?
It might look good on Wall Street, or bloody the waters for profit hungry sharks, but my question is more basic — how do these people sleep at night, and how do they ever look at themselves in a mirror?
About Hemant Rustogi
I would say the vast majority of private companies and family-owned businesses take into serious consideration the long term health and well being of good employees, often to the detriment of profits and personal gain. However, the tactics you reference are certainly predominant within public companies or private companies with a larger base of shareholders. So, who’s driving those decisions? Typically the C-level execs get the blame but I would suggest you need to go higher up the food chain. Even higher than the boards and the large funds that own those equities. In my opinion it’s individual investors that are collectively driving for greater short term returns without any understanding or concern for the culture of the business or the impact to its employees. Investors want more passive income and better returns on their money. The CEOs are giving the investors what they want and both are being compensated handsomely for it. Also, as consumers we’re always looking for best deal on our purchases. Those ‘great deals’ are often the result of cheap labor extreme cost cutting. The people milling about Best Buy don’t seem to care. So, maybe we need to look no further than the mirror to figure out what’s driving this behavior.