What Are Your Stories About New Management Coming In and Messing Up a Great Workplace?
Have you ever worked somewhere that was genuinely a great place to work, only for new management to come in and completely change things for the worse?
I’ll start with mine.
So my main job is in a professional role where I split my time between working from home and being in the office or wherever they need me. I work four days a week, and overall I have a pretty good work life balance. Especially when I’m working from home, where there are times when all I really have to do is reply to emails. So I’ll play video games, do housework, etc. while still being available if something comes up.
I also took a part-time job at a grocery store as a grocery clerk, where I worked three days a week for about 8 hours a day. Honestly, I took the job for three pretty simple reasons: I loved most of the people I worked with, the actual work was relatively easy, and the store was close to home. It was basically a nice little side job that I didn’t mind going to.
This story is mainly about the grocery store job.
For the first year, the grocery store job was going great. I loved my coworkers, and to my surprise, the store had only a handful of annoying or difficult customers. Most of them were actually kind and lovely people.
The work wasn’t too hard either. We kept up with inventory, did incredibly well in sales, and the schedule generally made sense.
Then one of the senior employees (who is a complete scumbag) got his way and finally pushed both the Grocery Manager and her Assistant to the brink. They both left.
And guess who ended up getting the Grocery Manager position?
Yep. The scumbag.
The Assistant Manager position went to one of the best full-timers we had on the grocery roster someone everyone got along with. We were all friends with everyone in the department… hell the store! Well except for the new Grocery Manager. Everyone hated him except for the Store Manager.
Six months pass, and this guy has completely destroyed the department.
Inventory was horrible. Sales had gone to shit. And the schedule made ZERO sense.
For example, he would schedule three people to close on a Saturday when there was barely anything to do besides milk, overstock (extra inventory that doesn’t fit on the shelves and has to be stored in the back), and the usual facing, which is basically moving everything toward the front of the shelves so the department looks nice for the next day.
But then Monday would come around, when we’d have to receive multiple grocery and dairy deliveries because the departments had been merged, and he’d schedule one full-timer and one part-timer who didn’t even start until 5 PM!
Meanwhile, on Wednesdays, when HE was closing, there could be five people scheduled: three full-timers, including himself, and two part-timers.
So obviously, this stressed everyone out more and more as the months went on.
Eventually, the terrible scheduling led to our inventory becoming a disaster. Overstock started piling up in the back because we weren’t getting enough people scheduled to actually work through it.
And the Scumbag wasn’t exactly known for doing his share of the work. He’d constantly ask the Assistant to help with grocery, even though the Assistant was responsible for dairy and was already drowning in work.
Eventually, the Assistant snapped.
He got into a fistfight with another employee while apparently looking for the Scumbag because he wanted to fight him.
He got fired.
After that, our dream team basically got whittled down to four overworked and overstressed full-timers and four overworked and overstressed part-timers.
Sales continued to drop. Inventory always looked horrible. We had a revolving door of part-timers quitting, and eventually I left too because the extra cash wasn’t worth the stress anymore.
Hell, before Christmas last year was the first time I had ever walked out on a job.
The new Grocery Assistant was on vacation.
Oh yeah… so this idiot Scumbag had gotten so overwhelmed after losing the previous Assistant that he basically held off on letting the full-timers take their vacations. As a result, the two remaining full-timers (one of whom eventually quit and the other who became the new Assistant) ended up having to take their four week vacations back-to-back starting in November.
So anyway, the Scumbag apparently placed a double order on top of what the Assistant had already ordered the previous week.
Why?
Because for some reason, he didn’t want to call the Assistant and ask whether he had already placed an order before going on vacation.
And who did he want to sort through, organize, and prepare all of this extra inventory for the upcoming sale?
Me. A part-timer!
I told him to kick rocks and walked out.
Funny enough, they were so short staffed that I didn’t actually get in trouble. Instead, I basically got a call begging me to come back and I even got paid for the entire day.
Looking back, writing all of this out was actually pretty therapeutic lol.
TLDR: I had a great part-time grocery job with awesome coworkers and easy work. Then a senior employee became manager and completely ran the department into the ground with terrible scheduling, poor inventory management, and constant understaffing. Eventually, I walked out only for them to call me begging me to come back and still pay me for the day
Anyway, I’d love to hear your stories!
Have you ever worked somewhere that was genuinely great until new management came in and messed everything up? What did they change, and what happened afterward?