I’m sure there are still some “old-school” bosses running around who believe the best way to motivate employees is to threaten them and never let them forget that they can be fired at a moment’s notice.
Turns out that they aren’t motivating as much as actively harming them.
Don’t get me wrong. I would have still spent some time reviewing the document before the meeting, making notes, and mapping out plans after the other meeting. But because these were not in the middle of back-to-back meetings, I could do them and keep the flow through the process. I wasn’t filing it away in my brain and hoping I could fully recall it later. It was fresh.
It was better.
More importantly, consider what you communicate in your actions when someone does take PTO. Does everyone on the team email them while they are out so they can get a response as soon as they are back? Do you cram in a bunch of meetings or work they need to do before leaving?
Do you think this helps them feel less stressed?
It’s much more likely that they’ll take PTO but not get any benefits from being away from work. That’s missing the point entirely.
Tim leaves out of his analysis accounting for how many users will no longer be there and how that much smaller user base impacts the value proposition. If I’m a journalist using Twitter to interact with readers and attract new readers to my publication, the ROI of paying for a fully-featured Twitter account includes considering how many people it helps me reach. Is it still worth it when my 250,000 followers get cut to 25,000? What about 2,500? What about less?
Before you dismiss that as unlikely, I’d like you to remember that recent Pew research found that “the top 25% of users by tweet volume produce 97% of all tweets, while the bottom 75% of users produce just 3%, according to an analysis conducted over a three-month period in 2021.”
I’m going to just assume that the 75% group who isn’t tweeting very often is not going to pay for Twitter. Of the other 25% we have to consider how many of them will fall into the $12 per year plan because they already don’t follow many people but use Twitter to interact with people who want to follow them. The question is, will those followers still exist? And if they don’t exist, is Twitter still a global conversation? Or is it just another place for privileged people who pay for membership to talk to each other?
These people have watched companies “reward” the loyalty of Boomer and Gen X employees with layoffs, unfunded pensions, forced retirements, etc. They aren’t going to be loyal for the sake of loyalty to a company that will cut their job at the first sniff of an economic downturn. They will go to the place that benefits them the most.
If you’re not interested in providing skills and career development, don’t expect people to work for you. It’s not worth it.
I’m sure at some point, Elon Musk thought for sure that he could buy Twitter and do a better job of content moderation. I’m sure most of us have had a similar thought. We just didn’t have $44 billion lying around.
He did, and now he gets to realize something the rest of us should know by now. There’s no easy way to do it.