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What to Do if Your Company Is Gaslighting You
Beware the ‘too nice’ workplace
Ishould have anticipated disaster when they canceled the company holiday party. The four previous year-end fetes had been fancy dress-up functions, tricked out like a mid-tier wedding reception: open bar, DJ, a photo booth with props. Those of us based at the company’s East Coast satellite office were flown to its San Francisco headquarters for the occasion, where we were set up in boutique hotels with expense accounts for food and drink. We were, as they say, living high on the hog. Until we weren’t.
For as long as I’d been employed there, the company had hemorrhaged money. The ever-shrinking budgets were increasingly hard to hide, even as management promised a course-correction was on the horizon. Lucrative partnerships were always one signature away, and vague game-changing strategies never seemed to bear fruit. For my colleagues and I, an old truism was reversed: Good news was no news. Each promise of a brighter tomorrow was a word salad of corporate lingo.
So the cancellation of the holiday party, and the sudden belt-tightening that accompanied it, seemed potentially hopeful. A bit of late-onset financial responsibility was, at least, proactive. We still had jobs, and that was what mattered in an industry where jobs were increasingly scarce.
Four months later, we were all laid off.
This isn’t a hit piece on my former employer (I’m over it, I swear!), but a workplace parable of sorts. Bad news is tough to deliver under most circumstances, but it’s especially hairy when the recipient’s ability to pay the bills is on the line. I get it. But in order to work well together, people need to be able to talk freely about any manner of work-related problems. And nothing stymies that possibility quite like a workplace culture that’s too nice.
I don’t mean nice as in cordial and pleasant and respectful. I mean “nice.” Passive aggressive. Sugarcoat-y. Disingenuous. Dishonest.
From a bottom-line perspective, a little sugarcoating might seem like a good business strategy in trying times. If workers don’t know precisely how bleak a situation is, they’re more likely to continue to produce as if trying is worth it: cha-ching and so forth.
