Organizations love their people.
It says so on the website. Usually near a stock photo of a diverse team laughing at something that isn’t that funny.
For years the deal was simple. Show up. Be reliable. Know the systems. Build the relationships. Loyalty rewarded with stability. Stability rewarded with loyalty. Generations knew the arrangement and built lives around it.
Showing up must still matter. That’s why companies are asking everyone back to the office.
Until the business changed and the language didn’t.
At some point, people became resources. Employees are, after all, the company’s greatest asset. Apparently assets depreciate. And there’s considerably less guilt involved in terminating a resource than a person.
The ones who gave the most — sometimes 25+ years — had confused loyalty with job security.
An honest mistake, given how many times they’d been told the two were the same thing.
Decades of institutional knowledge walk out the door while a security guard watches someone box up their belongings.
What could go wrong?