15+ Employees recount actions from their managers that caused morale to plummet: 'Boss made a big speech about austerity measures and no raises this year'

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Ben Weiss • Writer and Editor
Apr 18, 2025 8:00 AM EDT

When poor management tries to boost team morale, it usually has the opposite effect. That's because the standard ways of motivating everyone—pizza parties, happy hour events, etc.—are obvious and lame in 2025. Sure, employees could use some of that bonding time, but that's not going to get people to work harder than they're already working with no extra perks. 

There really is only one effective way to get employees to work harder and that's to offer them fair compensation. Most of the time, poor management will do everything in its power to avoid providing raises and promotions. They will pretend like the added responsibilities they are piling onto their employees were always part of initial job descriptions. They will continue to dangle that carrot for as long as they can until their employees come to realize that they are being manipulated.

Now, sometimes, management isn't even trying and failing to boost morale. Sometimes, in the name of putting their foot down, they are quite simply letting morale plummet. Take a look at these anecdotes from employees whose managers caused a wave of discontent.

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    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

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    Imagine letting the sweetest cleaning lady go from your company... heartless!

    schimsl. I work in a big corporate building. The same older lady came by everyone's desk towards the end. of the day to collect the trash. Just the sweetest lady ever and every time she'd walk to my desk she'd give me a big smile and ask me how my day was and chat for a minute as she got my trash (usually I'd dump it in for her). I
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    had some rough days but she has a way to cheer me up and send me home on a higher note. I know I'm not the only one either. So then a few weeks back our work implemented a new policy to 'cut down on trash usage. It's no longer allowed to have a trash bin
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    at our desk and we have to walk across the room and use the community trash to throw anything away. Not a huge deal but the real reason they did it is so they can cut down on cost... ie the cleaning crew. Sad to say that I haven't seen Sharon since.
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    When sales incentives are met, they need to be honored!

    lifecoachannalisa ⚫ Boss Pitched a sales incentive trip to Cancun if the team hit the goal. My team exceeded the goal, and then they cancelled the trip. 2 people quit, I accepted a position with their main competitor, and less than a year later, they closed in bankruptcy. Karmas a beach.
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    Letting everyone know there's no upward mobility is an easy way to get folks to quit!

    DentedAnvil . Small business. 20 employees +/-. Boss made a big speech about austerity measures and no raises this year. A week and a half later he drives up in a brand new Silverado with all the bells and whistles. Expensed to the business of course. He would hate to have to pay taxes on those profits. One of the less subtle members of the staff took a literal sh in front of his office door.
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    wild_flower87 Put up a poster that said "Complaining is like vi ing. You feel better but everyone around you feels sick.". The morale was already bad but it was just a s way to take a hit at upset employees rather than do anything positive.
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    Another heartless threat!

    lovelesschristine . Telling employees that they are going to fire you if you don't make more sales. Then when someone quits tell them naww that was just motivation. We were never going to fire you.
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    Don't you love it when hiring managers disrespect the people who already work at the company?

    backstagestitches I told the hiring manager that I was disappointed in one of his hires because he knew literally NOTHING about our job and asked him "doesn't that cheapen my knowledge and expertise?"
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    His response: "Well, let's be honest, you job doesn't really need all that, does it?" There were four other people my level, with varying fields of expertise, at that meeting, and it got real quiet after that.
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    I'm sure their manager's bonus was exactly why this team worked so hard all quarter!

    HoboTheDinosaur I once had a retail manager who sent out a memo that we worked so hard and did such a great job this month that she gets a bonus. That went over like a lead balloon.
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    Banning teachers from drinking coffee when they already get paid so little is ruthless

    Son_of_Leeds • Former teacher. The administrators at my school were usually pretty chill, but had a habit of randomly coming up with minor rules that they would enforce for us (male teachers had to wear ties even on jeans day, etc.). Overall it wasn't bad, except for the time an administrator made a crucial mistake... they banned staff from drinking coffee in front of students.
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    Now if you've never worked in a school, you'd think this isn't a big deal. When you spend nearly 100% of your day in front of students, it definitely is a big deal.
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    First we tried to find any loophole we could. Energy drinks? Banned the next week. Tea? Banned two days later. It was chaos.
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    Eventually, we realized they couldn't fire an entire school's worth of teachers and aides, so we ended up doing the one thing that private schools fear most: we formed a union.
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    Realistically, it was more of a weird pseudo-union focused specifically on civil disobedience regarding the coffee issue, but it ruffled feathers nonetheless. The administrators caved to our "demands", allowed us to drink coffee again, and even bought each of us a reusable coffee mug as a gesture of goodwill.
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    And that's the story of how a handful of school administrators almost accidentally created a teachers union over a complete non-issue.
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    Emersonson Told a bunch of people they were going to be promoted to get us to do extra work, no one got promoted. I basically did her job for a month. Me and three of my co-workers quit and she got fired a few months later.
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    Paranitis. Had a boss everyone loved, then she got transferred to another store and the new guy that replaced her decided the schedule that we'd all gotten used to needed to be "shaken up". He
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    posted the next week schedule that was completely different than it had been under the previous manager, got a bunch of complaints from people saying they can't work x days or y times. and it SEEMED he was receptive since he took that schedule down. Then suddenly BAM, he just reposted the same exact schedule and said f everyone.
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    Oh, we had some people calling in sick from time to time under the old manager, but this new manager has pretty much half his crew every single day calling out because of his tactics.
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    capnhist . I have 2! Company 1: Cancelled the Christmas party and Christmas bonuses for the whole company because we "didn't have the money for it." I found out later the CEO and the CTO used company funds to take a week-long ski vacation in Whistler instead of doing something nice for the employees. You better believe I spread that evidence aroujnd the office.
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    Company 2: It's not one specific incident, but my current company in the last couple years switched from guaranteed permanent employment for anyone who worked there long enough to a system of permanent contract labor for a huge section of their workforce. Rumblings of unionization have started amongst the contract workers...
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    TRAMAP... held a super positive, pep rally style company wide meeting about how they were going to start combining our sick days with our vacation days and now just call them 'PTO.' This was presented to us as a great thing,
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    since we could all now use our PTO days fully as vacation days if we wanted to. Once the system was implemented, everyone realized that instead of getting 10 vacation days and 10 sick days per year, we now all had 15 PTO days. Everyone was ped.
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    zeeker1985 · In a company of 6 people, owner said in a meeting with everyone that his 2 sales guys are irreplaceable and that the rest of us are "just paper pushers".
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    [deleted] Had a big fight with his wife in front of everybody. I don't think you should run a restaurant with your family members unless you're really solid with each other.
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    [deleted] At an airplane factory: manager started rationing gloves, hairnets, masks, and trash bags at the same time we had to go on a 12x6 workweek, like that was gonna make up for the increase in labor.
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workplace-stories toxic-workplace work askreddit employees toxic-boss overworked-employees workplace Horrible Bosses Reddit toxic-work-environment
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