I was laid off a couple weeks ago. It seemed cordial, though you can never tell with these things. Especially so since it seemed like our department was infiltrated at the top by a cronyist who brought over (at hugely inflated job grades compared to those already in the same roles) and promoted only those in their personal circle of friends from a previous bank. It was extremely frustrating. Managers and middle-managers seemed out of touch for a long time, preoccupied with over-bureaucratizing our work so that they could create more work about work, hosting routine song-and-dance meetings to prove who would jump on command, and reducing our knowledge-based work to performance evaluation metrics more appropriate for a factory floor. Unsurprisingly, this resulted in a lot of people doing pointless or hurried work purely to ensure they met their quotas. No one owned anything anymore, and it felt like every bit of institutional, systemic, or analytical knowledge was treated as disposable, or often second-guessed. This created a culture of paranoia among managers, and resentment and distrust among the workers. Upper management's fixation with return-to-office (even for employees like me who were 100% remote for years, even prior to the pandemic) seems accusational, even infantilizing. My work used to feel quite interesting and rewarding in its end goal, yet the creep of dysfunctional culture and unnecessary RtO mandate soured my outlook quite a bit.
Although I am sad to see my years of service and knowledge so easily dismissed, I intend to take a bit of time for me before seriously looking again. And I think I'm done with this bank.
Was anyone else laid off recently? What was your experience, and what are you going to do?