Leaving in a snit

The other day, The Wall Street Journal reported on a study done by the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) that indicated that over three-fourths of employees leaving their companies would not recommend their employer to others. The CEB had analyzed 4,300 exit surveys from 80 mostly large (over $2B in revenue) companies to come up with this finding. That over 75% figure contrasts with the 42% recorded during our last balmy-palmy pre-recession days in 2008. (I tried to find the real ur source for this information, but the WSJ article appears to be it.)

It’s certainly not surprising that the number is fairly high.

Oh, sure, people do get recruited out of their cozy love nest of a job to take on a better opportunity somewhere else, and have no reason to “hate on” (I really hate on that phrase, but I did want to use it at least once in my life; note that I am using the more global meaning, not the original one tied to jealousy) their former employers.

But mostly if you’re leaving a company there’s an odds-on chance that you weren’t finding it Happy Valley to begin with.

So layer that on to the fact that the last few years have meant hard times: meager wage and salary increases (if any), benefit takeaways, lots of pressure for the leave behinds to do more with less as their fellow workers are laid off, and the ultimate Sword of Damocles: quit your bitchin’, you are completely, utterly, and instantaneously replaceable and should be smiley-face happy that you even have a job.

What’s not to hate (on)?

As the CEB’s Brian Kropp has it:

The scores likely reflect perceived poor treatment during the downturn, according to Mr. Kropp. "Companies were blunt and rough and tumble with their work force. They created a sense that 'the company doesn't care about me,'" he said

Companies, as we have learned from the Supreme Court, are people, too. So it should come as no shock that, when the times get tough, they become venal and nasty. There’s no lack of evidence that this sort of behavior is prevalent among regular, non-company, people people is there? Even, shocked, I’m shocked, our political leaders –

Anyway, it all got me thinking about whether I would recommend the places where I worked full time over the course of my corporate career.

And for all their meshugas and dysfunction, I mostly would have.

The exceptions are Wang Labs and Genuity, both of which, when I left, were so far into their death spirals that recommending them as a place of employment would be like giving someone a leg up to get back onto the Titanic while you’re seated (safe if not exactly comfy) in the lifeboat.

Wang I really didn’t like. It was colossally bureaucratic and non-sense bound. Still, I had wonderful colleagues and learned a ton. Genuity, crazy as it was – and Genuity set a very high (or low, depending on which way you want to look at it) standard for crazy – was a lot of fun (at least until we started on that death spiral, and much of my job was making the quarterly decision about which members of my group to add to the lay-off list). I met great people there, and most of my current work has come in some way shape or form through my Genuity network.

When I left Interactive Data, where I worked for six years after getting my MBA, I was in a complete snit – pissed at my boss for a bit of unintentional mistreatment. But, hey, even in the throes of my exit snit, I would have to have given them props for being a place that knew their market, knew who they were, and pretty much stuck to its strategic guns. The fact is that, 25 years after I left, this company is still around, and still serving its (same) market. Unlike any other place I’ve worked, a lot of the people I knew had long careers there.

At Interactive Data (or, more correctly, Dynamics Associates which had been acquired by Interactive shortly before I began working there), I learned lots of things about business, and made some of my closest life friends.

Maybe I should have stayed, rather than leave in a snit.

But if I hadn’t left Interactive for Wang – which was where I ended on the rebound -  I might not have found my way to Softbridge, where I spent nearly ten years of my professional life. While I can’t say I love, love, loved every moment, I learned tons; was often in the catbird seat from which to observe the zaniness that I have always found fascinating; eventually got to be one of the folks who ran the place; and made a couple of great friends. When I left Softbridge – or, rather, got tossed out -  it had been acquired and was in the process of getting merged in with some other small acquired outfits. So, at the moment of exit, if someone had bothered to survey me, I may not have been in a big hurry to recommend it. But, what can I say, if I had it to do over again I absolutely would have chosen to work there. That said, a few days after I was given the heave-ho, I was asked by a senior executive in the company that acquired Softbridge if I would be interested in coming back, and my answer was an unqualified ‘no’.

The final full-time job I had was with NaviSite. When I left I suppose I might have noted to anyone interested in working there that, at the time, the atmosphere was characterized by intense and fetid politics. But the company had some good products, some great customers, and some excellent people working there.

So I probably would have, perhaps dopily, been in the less than 25% who would recommend that others work at the place they’re leaving – with the recommendations being qualified, of course, to account for ability to withstand insanity, politics, and death spirals.