Background context: I work in surgical, and we recently opened a new office. When they designed the office, we said hey it probably isn't a good idea to have all the test robots in a big open room because they are REQUIRED to have the alarm sound on for a lot of testing. They ignored us and of course are pushing return to office hard. It's super loud.
Context 2: My team is working on the US FDA submission project, which we have been told by leaders is THE MOST IMPORTANT thing to the business, and that NO MATTER WHAT we have to stay on schedule. The team has been putting in seriously insane hours, like I was in a meeting where people had worked til 3am the night before in order to finish all deliverables to start V&V testing. We have been doing 60-80 hr weeks. This project has insanely high visibility to the c-suite and they have basically been threatening everyone to make sure we stay on track.
Ok so here is the story: We started testing, a huge milestone, a few weeks ago. Mike M has an office that is one floor above the testing. He apparently didn't realize that you can't turn the volume off on the robots during testing when he sent a little minion down there to ask them to turn it off. They kindly said that they can't but they turned it down to 50% (already a concession to him). The next day he sends someone else to the manager of the test team and makes them STOP TESTING because the alarm noises are apparently too much for him. This is the testing we have been told is ALL IMPORTANT. Like testers are coming on weekends, working late, we are all making sacrifices, etc. But we had to spend multiple days figuring out a solution so that our team could keep working without bothering his wittle ears. Like we had director level people brainstorming "solutions" on how we could get around the testing rules for this one man. Absolutely insanely bad for morale. Like can he not get noise canceling headphones??? A white noise machine?? He is a millionaire "genius" surely he can figure something out here. Meanwhile, this whole time they have been telling the rest of us in the office to su-k it up when it is too loud to hear meetings from our half cubes. To really round out the disgusting vibe of all of this, he didn't even ask himself. He sent proxies to do all of this and went to their manager when he didn't like the answer.
This attitude of extreme disdain for employees and snap decision making based on one man's comfort was extremely enlightening on why our business might be struggling. I'm assuming this kind of one man executive decision is also why summer hours was canceled. Reallyyyy just highlighting how the employees are just little worker bugs to them, all of us "making sacrifices to the bottom line," until it is a SLIGHT inconvenience to him. Anyway now he is moving offices and making someone else take his office that is supposedly unbearably loud... good luck to that person i guess? Maybe we should have invested in some sound proofing for this millions of dollars office project? I cannot imagine being so narcissistic and self important that you behave like this and are not ashamed of yourself. Maybe we should crowd source some noise canceling headphone recommendations for him that he can wear like a little baby at a concert.
Please share this with the other wage slaves so we can highlight who is really making the business run and who is holding us up.