Bad Day at the Office

Note: as you might suspect, the characters, events, places, and organizations in the following story are fictional. Something like this could never happen in real life.

“Phhht-ding!”

With that chime as its announcement, Microsoft’s Messaging App pushed its way past all my other open windows into the foreground of my laptop screen.?

The messaging app had become a metaphor for my life at The Company. Early on a Monday morning, an instant message, or “ping,” from the messaging app usually meant a member of the executive leadership team was about to interrupt me with a desperate need for more PowerPoint slides. Either that or it was my boss who, having read an article by some high-priced business consultant over the weekend, couldn’t wait to share his latest ideas for how I should be doing my job. Whatever the case, that “Phhht-ding!” meant the plans I had for the week were about to be scrapped in favor of somebody else’s priorities. I would receive my orders, then call a drop-everything meeting with my team to figure out how we could satisfy leadership’s urgent-request-of-the-week while still getting all of our real work done.

Just another typical week in the User Experience Design team at The Company.

“Just a minute, Julie,” I said into the phone.??“Justin is pinging me.”

Julie managed our user research team, and we were on our weekly one-on-one call to figure out our research plan for the next month.

“John?” was the message in the messaging app window, followed by a time stamp of the exact minute the message was sent.

“Hi Justin.” I typed rapidly and pressed Enter, hoping my response would be logged in the same minute as Justin’s query.

“Can you give me a call?” came the reply.

“Dialing…” I typed.

Somehow I sensed what was about to happen. In a low-trust business culture, instant messages from your former boss at eight in the morning rarely convey good news.?

“This could be it,” I told Julie. “I’ll call you back.”

“Ok,” Julie said. She knew what it meant too and hung up.

Things had been going downhill for about a year now ever since Brad was brought over from another office to oversee the user experience, business analysis, configuration management, and training teams in The Company. Brad’s position was an entirely new and – in my view – unnecessary layer of management. The position was never posted on The Company job board; it was simply filled out of the blue with Brad.

Brad’s first order of business was to meet with his managers. We convened in a sunny conference room on a warm spring afternoon: me, the UX manager, Theresa, the BA manager, Chuck, the configuration manager, and Nathan, the training manager. Dressed in a white shirt, tie, sport coat and wool slacks, and wearing a wide grin that was at once friendly and arrogant, he slid into the room ten minutes late, a testament to the busy schedules that executives at his level had to abide.?

I don’t remember much from that first encounter with Brad except two things that he said. His first proclamation, directed to all of us, was that he wanted everyone to be happy. Being told to be happy in your work sounded rather Orwellian to me, but for the moment I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt that his intentions were good. The second statement – which he directed specifically to me – was an admission that he didn’t know anything about user experience design.?

That was our first meeting, and the last any of us direct reports would hear from Brad for over a month. The business analysis manager transferred to a new position the next week. The configuration manager lasted another three months before taking a new job. The training manager, an army reservist, managed to escape overseas for a year on an active-duty assignment. That left me as the only remaining manager in the Brad dynasty.

It didn’t take me long to understand why Brad was here. He was buddies with the senior leader of our organization, and he had not progressed up the career ladder fast enough in his previous role. So I suspected he was brought in here so that he could earn his stripes over the next year or so.

I wasn’t particularly concerned by his ignorance of my profession…bosses who don’t know what the hell you do can be a good thing if they trust you to know what you’re doing and leave you alone to do it. Unfortunately, Brad would prove to be that second kind of clueless boss, one who is so convinced of his superior intellect and managerial prowess that he believes that, given a few weeks of “experience,” his own expertise will exceed your own, even though yours was earned over a decades-long pursuit of excellence in your field.

His first idea, after a few weeks of study, was to rename our team from “User Experience Design” to “Human Factors Engineering.” This, he said, sounded like a more important and modern name (which I suppose he found in a Google search). When I explained to him that I hadn’t worked with “human factors engineers” since the 1980s and that “user experience” was the more contemporary moniker, he just smiled at me and walked away.??

After six months in his new role, he was asking me about conferences in the user experience field that he could attend – not just attend, but present at, so deep and profound had his knowledge of design become that he felt compelled to share it with the world to build his reputation. Your personal brand was a big deal at The Company.?

At the seven-month mark, Brad traveled to our other office and hired three new designers for our user experience team there. He neither consulted me nor the local manager who reported to me. We didn’t find out he had hired them until one of them showed up for work one day.?

So, I held on for about another year trying to shield my team from the man who could manage anything…until that ping from Justin floated out of the ether and onto my desktop on that Monday morning in May.

I always liked Justin. An enthusiastic and authentic leader with an infectious smile, he had hired me a couple of years earlier to bring “game changing” design to The Company. I reported to him for about six weeks before my department was transferred to someone else, then back to Justin nine months later, then to someone else, and finally to Brad. In a way I was glad that it was Justin’s job to fire me, even though he was no longer my boss.??

Even though I was on the phone, in my mind’s eye I could see Justin sitting there in the tiny conference room with the HR woman by his side, reading the script she had given him. I knew the script well because I had been forced to use it during the two previous rounds of layoffs, one each year since I started with The Company.

“John, due to economic conditions and realignments in business priorities, your position has been eliminated. Today will be your last day with The Company.”

That was it. Two sentences and my job with The Company was over. I’m sure the HR manager nodded to Justin at this point and encouraged him to pause to let the news sink in and give me time to respond.

What do you say to something like that? Thank him for the great experience I had working for The Company? Tell them they could all go to hell? Or maybe, with a tone of sarcastic incredulity, say something like “So when I’m gone, you’re going to let?Brad?lead the team?” (Little did I know until later that day that finding a new leader for the team was not their concern.)

I didn’t want to cause Justin any further anxiety, and I knew from personal experience that any further discourse was pointless. So, I just said “Ok. When do you want me to turn in my laptop?”

Justin then handed the phone to HR to explain the severance package and other assorted details.

I hung up with Justin and called Julie back.

“Well, I’m gone,” I said when she picked up the phone.

“You’re not the only one,” Julie said. “It’s happening in other departments, too,” and she named three other people who had been let go so far that morning.

“I’m calling a meeting with the UX managers right now,” I said. “Look for the invite in a couple of minutes.”

“Hurry,” she said. “Your email won’t work for long.” Julie had been with the company for twenty years and knew how quickly The Company could erase all evidence of your existence.

In three minutes, I was on a conference call with the managers on my team: Julie, Christina, and Sean.??Actually, they were no longer managers; Brad had “flattened” the user experience organization, demoting all of my managers and having everyone report directly to me. Giving me double-digit direct reports was just one of the many signs that Brad was making moves to force me, and probably my managers, to resign. But, to me, they were still the leaders of the organization and I relied on their expertise.

“Guys,” I said. “Justin called me this morning to let me know my services were no longer needed.”

“It looks like it’s going to be a bloodbath,” Christina said.

“Yeah,” Sean said. “The training department is getting hit hard, too.”

“Ok,” Christina said. “We should collect everyone’s personal email addresses. Send them to me and I’ll compile them.” I always loved Christina for that. With our team in peril of breaking up, her first thought was to find a way to keep us together.

“Let’s do it,” I said, and we all hung up.?

As for my situation, I was surprised and not surprised at the same time. I had become a political outsider for several months now, so I figured it was only a matter of time before my unpopularity with the executives caught up with me. For this reason, I was not surprised. But for the past year I had taught a popular class in user experience design to the entire organization, and as a result, everyone in the non-executive ranks knew me and, in many cases I think, respected me and the members of my team for the contributions we were making to The Company. We were designing apps for iPads, creating innovative social media applications, and leading design-thinking workshops for all of our major projects. Our design standards were light years beyond where they were when I started my job two years ago. For these reasons, I was surprised.

But my surprise at getting laid off was nothing compared to what was about to happen.

At 1:47pm that afternoon, our new email distribution list lit up. Donna, who had been with The Company for over thirty years, sent the first message with the subject, “Bad Day at the Office”:

“Even though we aren’t an official team anymore, I still love our team. Since many of our mailboxes are filled, I thought I’d write and let you guys know the list of us who are no longer with The Company:

Laid Off

Donna

Elise

Paula

John

Christina

Andy

I’d love to think that’s the end of it but, if you aren’t on the list it’s probably a good time to be backing up your laptop.”

At 1:56pm Julie wrote,

“Add me to that list.”

At 1:57pm, Sean wrote:

“Julie

Daniel

It’s not over yet.”

For an hour or so, messages circulated with links to job sites. Then at 2:41pm, Scott, who had only joined the team a few months earlier and had moved to The Company from out of state when he accepted this job, wrote:

“I was just informed that my services weren’t needed. It’s been a pleasure to meet and work with all of you. I am not sure what the future holds for me and my family. We barely feel like we are settled in at all.”

By late afternoon, only two people had not gotten “the call.”?

At 4:27, Sandra wrote:

“Peter and I are just sitting and waiting for our call now. Sheer torture, at this point. We are guessing they are going to make us come back tomorrow. I’d rather sleep in??.”

At 4:31, Paula responded:

We have an awesome, awesome team but I suspect we won’t really be appreciated until we’re gone. You’re in my prayers Peter—maybe they’ll keep the mobile team together.”

At 4:38pm, Peter wrote:

“Nope, didn’t make it.”

Then, a few minutes later, Sandra was gone too.

One by one, my entire team of UX managers, designers, and researchers was decimated, leaving only our stunned remote office team to carry on.?

Having joined only two and a half years ago, I was not as invested in the company as most. Christina, Julie, and Sean had all been with the company for more than twenty years. Donna, the most technically skilled of our designers, had been there more than thirty years. At the other end of the spectrum, Sandra had only been with us for less than a year and Scott for only about six months. We were a diverse and exceptionally talented team of designers and researchers, and we were all suddenly unemployed in the middle of one of the worst economic downturns the country had ever seen.

And we weren’t just colleagues. We were friends. Even those of us who had never met face-to-face, but only through email and teleconferences, had a close bond. The day after the layoffs, Ellen, one of our designers in the other office, started a private Facebook group for all of us to stay in touch.?

Personally, I was relieved to leave The Company. I was tired, so tired, of overloading my team with too much work (often 4-5 projects per person at any one time), and dealing with the continuous stream of organizational strategies and the relentless but ambiguous demands to make our applications “cooler.”?

(This inability to read the executives’ minds to divine their definition of “cool” was, I learned later, the reason for my downfall and my team’s ejection from The Company. After we left, an announcement was made that “anyone can design a simple, usable product. What we need are artists who can make our products beautiful!” This was the prevailing wisdom of the senior executives of our organization and despite numerous attempts I could never convince them that in the application world beauty fades, but complexity lasts forever.)?

As they say, you can’t reason someone out of something they weren’t reasoned into.

I was hired to be a game changer. Problem was, it was the rules of the game that kept changing. I was hired for my expertise in user experience design, but in the end my expertise was not compatible with the goals of the leadership – the same leadership who once admitted to me that they knew nothing about user experience design.?

But boy did they know cool when they saw it, and cool was what they wanted. Ironically, we did give them cool, but never at the expense of usability and simplicity. Unfortunately, their definition of cool changed weekly with every new iPad app they downloaded, and they never did realize that making something cool?and?usable takes time, research, iteration, and both design and development expertise – all investments they were not willing to make.?

So I imagine the executives all got together and talked about how they could reduce their overhead costs in a struggling economy. Like unscrupulous used car salesmen, they searched for a solution that would make their products look good in the short term even if they performed poorly down the road.??Ultimately, they decided that it was easier and cheaper to paint the car than to fix the engine. So, they fired all the master mechanics who understood how the cars worked and hired painters to make them look pretty.?

I felt terrible for my teammates; most of them had homes and families that they could not easily uproot to move to a place where jobs were more plentiful. But I wasn’t as worried about my personal prospects. I had over thirty years’ experience and a good resume. My two kids were out of college and doing well in their own careers. So, my wife, dog, and I were relatively free to go wherever the jobs were. I even imagined that I would find a new job in a month or two, long before my severance ran out, and would therefore profit from the change.

Getting laid off – that kind of rejection – always delivers a hit to your self-confidence. But I convinced myself that this event could actually be a wake-up call that was forcing me to leave a bad job for a good one, and that it would quickly resolve itself into one of the greatest opportunities of my career.

I have never been more wrong – or more right – in my life.?