30 People Recall The Mass Resignations That Followed A Single Office Event

Well I've never worked somewhere where everyone quit. But I have worked at a place that a great deal of people would have quit if they hadn't fixed the issue asap.

It was at a call center for a cell phone company. The holidays were usually handle like this:

-if it was your day off you didn't work unless you told the scheduling department you wanted to work.

-everyone else bid on the shifts available. One of the options was “no shift”. If you didn't want to work that was your number one bid.

-you then put all the rest of the shifts in order of what you wanted to work most to least in case you didn't get it off.

-bidding was then done with reverse seniority, seniority meaning how long you'd worked there. So the more seniority you had the less likely it was you'd have to work.

They also promised to get the holiday shifts posted at least a month before the holiday so you could plan.

One year we were coming up on the holiday season. In October we'd been asking about the bid for Thanksgiving. They don't get back to us. End of October/beginning of November (I forget exactly when) our associate directors held a meeting with each of their teams. They said this year they were running the holidays as a normal work day. If you worked Thursday then you worked whatever your normal shift was on Thanksgiving. Three weeks before the holiday. After many people booked trips due to no news from them and their seniority (mostly those that hadn't had to work holidays in the past). And no you could not put in a time off request, like you could for other Thursdays, because it was a holiday and they needed sufficient staffing.

Oh the uproar. Literally everyone pushed back on this. Many stated they'd be calling in sick or using their emergency day off, which the company gave each quarter it was basically a vacation day you didn't have to preschedule. By the afternoon they realized how badly they f*cked up. We told them repeatedly if they'd given more notice of this we would have been more willing to accommodate it. By only giving three weeks notice they were f*cking up the holiday plans of literally hundreds of agents (call center had 800–900 agents affected by this).

By the time I left, 7 or 8 pm, they'd sent an email saying they'd go back to the original way of doing the holiday shift bids. That was done quickly, but still only have two weeks to plan if you had to work. They did have more holiday shifts than normal, but nowhere near the amount of people that normally work Thursdays. They said they'd let us know what way we were doing Christmas and New Year's the week after Thanksgiving.

Result: they kept holiday shift bidding the same. That Thanksgiving they had a lot more people than they needed. Scheduling ended up letting a lot of them leave early to keep the agent to calls ratio in the range they were supposed to be in. Great hoopla that ended with things right back where they started.

Todd kept slapping everyone.

Our paychecks bounced! In all candor I would not have noticed, but you know that every shop has the person who gets his paycheck and immediately leaves work and goes to the bank. Well, that guy came back and started yelling at the managers, that his check was no good, and that started a sh*tstorm.

The ‘branch-office’ in Norwalk we were at (formerly KG-Data), had been recently acquired by FastComm Corp (in Georgia IIRC). Well they were broke, but were hiding the fact as best as they could. Until the SHTF.

The entire engineering team, and the secretary, basically walked out. Fortunately it was a lovely early April day in 1999 so we all went to the deli and ate our lunches at a nearby picnic table.

The guy who sold the and was the defacto manager (VP-division, Pres old biz name) was pissed, and embarrassed, and angry at us, but, really had nothing to fall back on. We learned shortly thereafter that he was ‘aware’ of difficulties, but had said nothing. One guy quit that very afternoon. Packed his things and that was that! He was the smart one. The rest of us stuck it out.

They managed to get us all a ‘stipend’ about two weeks later, but we didn’t get back on ‘payroll’ for months. They let the secretary go, then tech/IT guy, the engineering team kinda hung on because we enjoyed spending time together, and we figured that a mass exodus would only diminish their incentive to deliver back pay.

Since we all had side gigs, we would collaborate on each others projects during our now *extended* lunches. Pay remained sporadic through the rest of the summer, in the fall they closed the doors and didn’t even bother to preserve our work. I think they declared bankruptcy later that year.

For at least two months our employer had to go to a local downtown bank to borrow enough money to make payroll. This was a small town with only one or two banks . You know our employer did not get a good rate. We had to volunteer to take cuts to our already low paychecks. It was not the kind of place where people could just quit. But everyone who could sent out letters and resumes. Within eighteen months everyone who could find something better was gone. Including me and my spouse. Eventually, the outfit did shut down.

BTW, nothing against small town banks. They, more than many, must be careful about loaning money.

The company announced they were closing the operations center within 6 to 9 months and transferring all the work to another state. Within three to four weeks there was only a skeleton crew of people still working and a fairly large number of temporary workers from a temporary staffing agency had to be hired. The irony is that the company never intended on running people off. Most employees were going to be offered jobs in the new state, and those that weren't, or didn’t take the new job, had plenty of time to get a new job. But about 90% of the workforce left like rats leaving a sinking ship.

I was an early childhood educator and I worked at my first job for five years. The first three years were amazing. We had a wonderful director who truly cared about her staff, the children and their parents. She was extremely professional and very hard-working.

Then, she informed all of us that she would be leaving at the end of the year. We were all unhappy about it because she was doing a great job. She assured us that she would find the appropriate person to replace her. To make a long story short, the woman that she decided to hire did an excellent job conning her into believing that she was something that she was not.

This woman was a horrible director and she was not a good person. We all discovered this a few months into her having started her job as director. The worst issues were that she was a liar and that she took credit for any effort or idea that any staff member had.

After the first year working with this woman, the majority of us were getting frequent headaches and migraines. Another interesting fact is that in those first three years where things were going well, within a few months, we all ended up having our periods at approximately the same time. We were all in sync and it was very bizarre. Shortly after this new director started working in our agency, we noticed that all of our periods went haywire.

We were all unhappy with what was taking place but being the kind of people that we were, we wanted to give this director the benefit of the doubt. We thought that it might be largely attributed to the fact that it was her first year at this job. We stuck it out another year in the hopes that things would improve, but as our second year with her was coming to an end, five out of eight core staff members (including myself) couldn’t take it anymore and we all gave our notice.

Our agency had a phenomenal reputation and this woman was driving it into the ground. We couldn’t leave fast enough as we were all miserable. I was prepared to even take a pay cut if I had to if it would give me back my mental health.

For anyone who had their doubts about how this woman would react to us leaving, she really outdid herself. She wanted to “show her appreciation” for our years of dedication in our jobs so she informed us that we would all be receiving a gift card in the amount of $10 for each year of service! Yes, you read this correctly. TEN DOLLARS for each year that we taught in this agency. Some of my colleagues got a $10 or $20 gift card while I was one of the fortunate ones - I got a $50 gift card!

In all honesty, none of us were expecting any kind of gift or acknowledgement for our efforts and I think it would have been better had she given us nothing. It was very insulting! None of us had any regrets about leaving and we all found other jobs pretty quickly. Over a period of time, this woman was eventually forced out of this daycare for the many inappropriate things she had done.

I was working as employee communication manager in the HR department of a major newspaper company. Our VP involved us in setting strategy, then left us alone to accomplish the strategy while touching base with us monthly and being available to run interference with his peers when needed. We managers had frequent and direct contact with company leaders.

Then the company wanted to break a union. They promoted our VP, who was also an engineer, into the VP Production job and filled the VP HR role with a former labor negotiator from a tiny newspaper with no people management experience. At our first staff meeting, the new VP told us how long he expected us to stay at our desks each night so he would look good to other senior leaders, regardless of whether our work was done. He told us we were to not take any initiative to handle issues that came up but just to do as he told us. He announced that he would not share with us information about where the company was heading that he learned during leadership meetings, but we were to tell him anything we learned that he might find useful. We were no longer allowed to contact senior leaders directly but to go through him for everything.

People started leaving immediately, including the two people who reported to me. Because the VP had also put a freeze on hiring, I ended up doing both of their jobs, which involved very visible tasks like getting out two weekly newsletters, aa monthly magazine, managing Town Hall meetings, etc. When it came time for my annual review, I got a 0% increase because I had not been able to fulfill all my own more strategic, but less visible, responsibilities while doing two other people’s jobs. That was the final straw that led to my leaving.

I stayed in touch with old friends in the department. Within one year every single person working in the HR department the day the new VP arrived had left the company except for two secretaries who transferred into new departments. Within 3 years, he had broken two unions and was retired with a ton of company stock. His replacement was much more like our original VP, with the result that he had to fire most of the staff because they didn’t know how to take initiative and many had no qualifications for their jobs (e.g., the employment manager had come from a telephone sales job at the newspaper). So within three years there was 100% turnover in the same department—twice.

I once taught at a private school that had seen declining enrollment for years, and was finally given an ultimatum, along with five similar schools in the area, to consolidate campuses with each other in a way that was financially sustainable. Representatives (I was one of them) from the six schools met several times over several months to come up with a plan. The plan was to consolidate all six schools into a single school with two campuses, one each at one of the existing schools.

So, basically, four of the schools were going to close.

The decision was made by Christmas, and was announced to the schools’ faculties and students and students’ parents shortly after. My school was one of the ones that was closing.

But, rather than do the smart thing and close the school at the end of that school year, they decided to announce that the school would close at the end of the next school year. They promised all of the teachers that we’d get the chance to interview for a job at the new school, which we all did. Then, on the Friday right before Spring Break, as we were leaving the building, they gave us all envelopes. All but two of them said “thanks for applying, but we are going to keep looking.”

So there we were, six weeks before the end of the school year, with one more full school year before that school closed, knowing that, when the school closed, we would need to find another job.

Most of my coworkers didn’t wait. They found new jobs over the summer, and didn’t return for that final school year. So did the principal. So did almost half of the students. The school struggled to find teachers to fill the vacancies because, again, the school was slated to close at the end of the year. No one wanted to sign up for a one-year position.

I was one of the few teachers who stayed through that last year. The other few who stayed and I all agreed that they shouldn’t have stretched out the closing over the summer. They should have announced the school closing in the winter, like they did, then close it at the end of the year.

We didn’t all quit per se, but the end result was the same.

Let me explain: Back in the ‘90s, before the internet was really a thing, I worked for a high-tech company that was putting out a medical series on CD-Rom for your computer. Cancer, Breastfeeding, Amputee… if you wanted to know about this stuff you wanted a shiny disc to put into your computer.

We had an amazing team. I was the medical illustrator, but we had 3D animators, regular animators, a team of developers, etc. For the time we were cutting edge. We worked out asses off (one guy slept under his desk), we stayed late, worked weekends, etc. Most of us were in our 20s and when a product went to gold (meaning it was done testing and was about the be manufactured), we would party hard at someone’s house. We were like a family. Sadly, we were never given a dedicated sales team and so the product was never marketed properly. One year after I joined, we were called into a meeting and told that the line was being discontinued…

BUT (I like big buts and I cannot lie)… A successful multimedia company from Toronto was buying the product, they loved the team and they were willing to keep us together!

BUT (okay, now I’m not so fond of buts)… They were based in Toronto and they would really prefer that all 18 of us relocate to that city (I guess I should mention that we lived in Ottawa, approximately 400km away). They wanted to interview all of us and they promised that they were seriously considering leasing office space in our hometown if we all agreed to stick together.

Here’s the thing… I already mentioned that we were tight. Family-tight. Like, “Do you need a massage?” tight. Not sexual. Close. We truly loved one another. Had this new company just let us do what we had already been doing… status quo… just hang a new shingle on the door… then… aside for the day we’d take moving our coffee cups and sleeping bags to a new address… we were ready to go. Here’s the thing. The new owners sent us our new offers, and to a man/woman, they offered us 10% LESS than what we HAD been making.

Did they think we wouldn’t discuss this with each other?!

We got a new administrator and DNS (director of nursing services) at the same time, they arrived at the same time supposedly to clean things up, which was weird as we were #2 after the private Jewish facility. Turnover for those positions are generally 18 months as we are the smallest facility the owners have so a training facility for new administrators who then get transferred to more challenging facilities making room for another new one. The morning meeting went from discussing patients coming and going to picking on a department head to drive them to quit. All the department heads, most of the nursing staff and quite a few others quit without being replaced when the two left. Turns out the DNS was being hidden as she was the subject of a sexual harassment lawsuit and the administrator was also being hidden for verbally abusing patients and families. Don’t know where they went but was happy to see them go.