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So if you've worked for a big company for any length of time, this may all sound familiar to you. Here's the sequence of events. One day you get a notice from corporate that there's a spending freeze. Can't buy anything without corporate approval, even if it's budgeted. That usually comes along with a hiring freeze, meaning if someone quits you can't replace them, even if there's a budget for it. Then come the layoffs. Then comes the employee rally. Huh what I'm jimpolling? This is my view from the middle. Now, before I get started here, let me just say this. I'm not mad at anyone, at least not anymore. Holding a grudge for more than a couple of days is counterproductive. I also don't intend to call anyone out for anything. Here the facts of the facts, and if that upsets some folks, well I can't help them at The stories here are purely for illustration in hopes you can relate them to your personal or business situation. In another episode of this podcast series, I talk about Ivory Tower managers. These are managers that have their heads so far up in the clouds that they have no idea what's really going on down on planet Earth, or even what's happening in their own company. They float along day to day in their little fantasy land, full of rationalizations for the weird decisions they make that can found the rest of us. These managers tend to get promoted, strangely enough, to the corporate level. So now you have corporate level Ivory Tower managers that inflict these inane decisions upon the entire company, not just one branch or local office. These are the people who I think invented the riff. Now I'm not talking about a guitar lick in a rock song. I'm talking about the acronym riff rif reduction in force. Someone in their infinite Ivory Tower wisdom thought that that acronym was somehow better than just saying layoffs, although it wasn't called that at the time. I was the victim of a riff myself in nineteen eighty three when I was laid off from Whoo. Whoo was the top country music station in the market for decades until a newcomer, K ninety two came in and unseeded them from their lofty perch. When K ninety two came onto the scene, management at Whoo told the staff they weren't going to react to them at all since WHOO was the legacy country station in the market. But from that point on, all they did was react to them. Whatever K ninety two did, who copied them. The new station started stealing employees from Whoo, stealing clients and stealing promotions. Who did nothing but mimic what K ninety two was doing, and always a day late and a dollar short, as the expression goes, never able to get a foothold. Pretty soon, revenues tanked and employees had to be let go. My sports guy and I were among them. I bounced back pretty quickly up across town at the Florida News Network and WKIS. I eventually became operations manager of FNN. I was laid off from that job in nineteen eighty seven, but was rehired in nineteen eighty nine and stayed with that entity until I retired at the end of twenty twenty one. FNN had a total of six owners during its existence. I worked for five of them and ten different general managers. I guess I was lucky throughout all those ownerships, since the various owners periodically had to lay off employees. For one reason or another, and somehow I always survived. It didn't always feel lucky, mainly because I was the one, on many occasions who had to do the dirty work and tell people they no longer had a job. Sometimes I wondered which was worse, being fired or being the one who had to do the firing, but I quickly shook that off as being stupid. Of course, getting fired is worse. You're without a paycheck and you have to go through a life change. Once, when the network was owned by evangelist Pat Robertson, my general manager was convinced that we needed to expand our offerings, so he came up with a plan to do just that, and he and I flew from Orlando to the home office in Virginia Beach, Virginia to pitch the plan and obtain the budget increases necessary to make it all happen. But when we got there, we were seated in a conference room where a finance guy came in with a list of our current employees. But before my GM could even begin his pitch, we were told that we needed to cut at least a dozen people from our current staff. All of a sudden, our expansion turned into a contraction. Our heads were spinning on the flight home, and we were forced to decide on a plan of action to lay off a dozen people from the staff. The day after we returned turned into a bloody day, with people getting fired left and right. A tough day for MYGM and myself, and an even tougher day for those who lost their gigs on that day. Later, the network was bought by clear Channel Communications, which was eventually renamed iHeartMedia. Clear Channel had earned the reputation in the industry as the Evil Higher for the way they conducted themselves with their employees. The company, regardless of their name or nickname as the case may be, went through several riffs, some more extensive than others, but always painful. In some regard. The market president always seemed to deflect questions as to the why when someone was let go. I surmised that the market president was sidestepping the question because they didn't honestly know the answer. Trouble is a company that constantly imposes these blood letting exercises makes its remaining workforce very jumpy and a lot less loyal than engaged. After about the second or third riff that cost hundreds of employees their livelihoods. The corporate geniuses started to realize that employee engagement seemed to be on the decline. Hmm, I wonder why they didn't get it though. The suit sent a survey around to all the employees, and market presidents were pressed to get everyone to participate. They really didn't know why engagement was low. Could it be that everyone came to work every day wondering if they would be riffed that day? Nah? Of course, the true purpose of the survey was to weed out those employees who had bad attitudes. Now, why would you have a bad attitude just because you were constantly afraid of getting fired? For no reason? I even brought up the question to our market president while we were in an all employee meeting about the survey. I don't remember exactly how I rewarded my question, but in essence, I asked if it was possible that the fear of losing their jobs could affect employee engagement. The market president just looked at me strange and dismissed my question out of hand. Being in middle management, I was basically the one told that someone below me had to go, and then I was responsible for making it happen. Occasionally, one of my superiors would conduct the termination meeting with me in the room, so I was in the odd position of not quite understanding the logic behind some of the firings while trying to explain it to the person being fired. In one of the riffs, a boatload of commissioned salespeople was let go. I asked how that would actually save the company any money, since they were only paid when they actually sold commercials anyway. The response was, oh, well, we're saving money in the infrastructure like desks, office supplies, and coffee coffee. Really, we're firing people so that they don't deplete our stock of Mocha Java in the brake room. My suspicion is the real answer is purely smoke and mirrors. The iHeart media investors just needed to see that we were cutting the head count. Forget for the moment that it wasn't really saving any money, just the number of names on the payroll sheet was being reduced. The same issue surrounds cutting part time hourly employees. It seems like they would rather have one employee working twenty hours a week than two people each working ten hours per week. Yeah, that makes sense. Not. I have to admit though that iHeart was very nice to full time people being riffed. The severance policy was two weeks of pay per year service plus two weeks, so a guy who has been with the company for twenty five years would get fifty two weeks of severance. Even some part timers, depending upon the situation, would get a little bit of severance. But that also begs a question, how does firing a full time guide today move the meter on the current budget if you're going to pay him for the next year. It doesn't. Again smoke and mirrors. We would occasionally get these flowery emails from the CEO that would talk about how well the company is doing, how we shouldn't pay any attention to the negative press out there about the company, and how they love and admire each one of us and think we're the greatest group of people that ever walk the face of the earth. A week later, another rift happens. Makes you develop a twitch after a while. I'm exaggerating a bit. They didn't really think we were the greatest group of people ever, but they'd like us to think so, so we don't quit and go work for the competition. Those of us who aren't getting riffed that is. So here's the way it would work. We get the email from the CEO about how we all want water and how well the company was doing because of us. Then a week later we'd get an edict imposing a spending freeze. Can't buy anything even if it's budgeted. Following that would be a hiring freeze. Can't replace anyone who quits, even if it's in the budget. After that comes the riff. Then comes the employee rally. Wait huh, yeah, that's right. In another episode of this series, I talked about Ivory Tower managers and how they love to hold meetings, managers meetings, manager's retreats, etc. To pad their ego. Another one of these ridiculous events is the employee rally. The rally is a raw ra session to allegedly pump up everyone about the stations and the company in general. Forget the fact that we just fired some of your closest friends for some inane reason. Let's talk about how great this company is. Raw Rah, there comes that twitch again. Look, guys, either build us up or knock us down, but please make up your mind, because this roller coaster thing you've got going on here is making us all nausey. I suppose the oblivious among us would buy into the charade and somehow reconcile the two events in their mind. Maybe they can be made to believe the firings are a good thing. Rarah. Some of my employees simply refused to attend the rally and made an excuse, lacking any sensible reason to convince them otherwise. I generally just pretended to buy the excuse. After all, if I wasn't a manager, I'd be making an excuse too. Maybe it's time for another employee engagement survey. Then there are the corporate guys who buddy buddy up to you to get them to do their leg work, making you believe that your staff is perfectly safe from any impending layoffs, all the while fully aware of what they're about to do to you. I had a corporate vice president do this to me. After joking with me and socializing with me with lunches and pretending to listen to ideas, he turned around and without any kind of warning, shut down my capital news bureau and try to fire a long time news anchor from my staff, all without even discussing the possibility with me, I say, tried to fire one of my anchors, because when he tried to do it, I went storming into the market president's office demanding that the process stop. I was willing to agree that a staffer needed to be laid off, but the guy, this corporate guy wanted to nuke, was too valuable to the operation to let go. This VP didn't know what he was doing, and he never discussed it with me. It's the only time in my career that I actually stormed into the boss's office and demanded anything in anger. And I didn't do it for effect. I did it because it was what was right for the company and the employee involved, and they knew it. What this guy should have done is confide in me early on so we could have worked out what was best for the situation. Instead, he chose deception. Needless to say, my relationship with that corporate VP changed a bit after that incident. I never trusted him on anything ever again. So there I was in the middle management above me. You tried to put lipstick on this pig. We called a reduction in force or writ a corporate vice president who conned me into a false sense of security and then took advantage employees below me who weren't engaged because they were gun shy of walking in one day and getting summarily fired for no apparent reason. Sometimes corporate shenanigans are just that shenanigans. They're designed that way, and if you ask questions about them, managers above you will talk in circles because they don't know the answers any more than you do. People below you will ask you questions, and you'll be forced to talk in circles too because you don't know the answers. And on it goes, and so on and so forth, and these weird games that companies play. I'm jimpulling, and that's my view from the middle. In the next episode, if you could go back in time and change the outcome of just one event, what event would that be? Bow the knee? Next one? My view from the middle, And I took my way U