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About 15 years ago I worked in a financial services company providing technical support for internal and external clients on our proprietary applications. At the time this happened it was mid December and our company was doing its annual gifts. It was typical for the company to give out things like coffee mugs, mousepads, refrigerator magnets, etc. They always had the company logo and a company slogan. We also would typically get something nice like a fleece pullover, a windbreaker, a scarf, etc. Those were typically good quality. I still have them all many years later and they are all in good shape.
I cannot remember what we got the year in question. But I do remember that for some reason our VP decided to give us something extra, just from her. This was a personal touch just for our department.
She gave us:
* Post-it notes
* Pens
* Paper pop up calendars
* Highlighters
None of them had the company logo, but all had some generic clip art and/or inspirational message (“If we take care of the customer they will take care of us!” for example). For the post-it notes, the art and message were so large it consumed more than 50% of the note surface. Same for the calendar. The names of the months on the calendar were so small I was “reading” it just based on general familiarity with calendars.
These gifts were a topic of conversation amongst our group, and our department in general, for years.
* The size of the inspirational messages made some of the items useless for their intended purpose.
* If we wanted any of these we could go to the supply closet in our building and get as many as we wanted for free.
* We were almost a paperless office and had no need for any of these things.
* The items were poor quality. I took one of the pens home. I don’t know how, but it seemed to fall apart after a couple weeks of use. Others reported similar failures.
During that week our VP participated in all of our group meetings. She made it a point to mention these gifts. She hoped it demonstrated her appreciation of us and also would help us deliver great customer service.
We were not necessarily offended by these gifts, but we were all bewildered by them. It made us wonder about the humanity of our VP. Did she not see the futility of the these things? Did she not understand the true message she was sending? Just about all of this stuff ended up in the supply closet with their relatives or went into the garbage. In hindsight I think we were lucky that the VP’s office was in a different city than our group, so we didn’t have to make at least a pretense of using them.
The next year our company went through a round of layoffs. In a department wide meeting someone asked our VP how many of our department were laid off. Our VP responded that our department was able to retain 96% of its employees, which was an odd way to phrase the answer to that question.
Anywho, at that time just about everyone in our department had been there at least 2 years. Some of my coworkers had been there for 10+ years and had built up a massive amount of industry, institutional, and technical knowledge. Some of our old hands were the most knowledgeable people in the building. Folks were constantly calling us for help and almost always we could help them.
The year after the layoffs we had a change in leadership. Our new VP decided that our department was a call center; just that and no more. She reduced costs by outsourcing some tasks offshore, which backfired spectacularly, so the jobs were brought back on shore. But by then it was too late. The following December almost all the old hands, including me, had moved to elsewhere in the company or left. Our department had turned into a switchboard / knowledge drain. The new employees often didn’t know what to do so they’d ship the ticket somewhere else or they’d call other departments for help.
For some reason those two Decembers popped into my mind after reading some stories on the subreddit [r/nursing](https://www.reddit.com/r/nursing/). Staff nurses are getting “Hang in there” posters and candy bars while travel nurses make 3X the salary.
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