Attending an “All Hands Meet” is absolutely irritating

Management calls it an “All Hands Meet”, but the only hand that is meeting is the hand of the management to the cheek of an average employee.

Probably attended 4 dozens of AHMs in varying market conditions and quite surprisingly EVERY AHM has the same format. A distinguished anchor adding fake enthusiasm starts the AHM with a delightful note thanking the leaders.

The Sales or Delivery head will come and show us numbers and tell you we are the best of best. If our numbers are up, they’re going to go on about it for 30 minutes about how it is the team work, efforts and togetherness that helped us achieve this.

If the numbers are down, they’re going to tell us we are still in a much better position and we are working in stealth to do much more.

After all the “we is greatest of all time” bs, a People’s team representative will take over. They’ll boast about how we hired better, some random survey to show everyone is upskilling continuously (somebody was forced to take an online course), another random survey showing we are 157% AI Enabled (everybody was forced to give an unlimited attempts MCQ tests) and another survey about how 80% of the people are happy to work here. (Options were: Very Very Happy to work here, Very Happy to work here, Happy to work here, Delighted to Work Here, OK to work here). They’ll spend another slide about how we are the epitome of DEI. And conveniently skip anything about promotions or hikes.

After 40 minutes of this exercise where we have established we are God, but a little better comes the god forsaken QnA.

Every. Damn. Person. You know would’ve asked about compensation and promotions. But somehow they dig deep to find two questions which are absolute BS. Questions like: “aRe wE rEaDy fOr aRtIfIcIaL iNtElLiGeNcE”.

52 minutes done. Then one question about the hikes. “Uhh, so are we going to get the hikes? If yes, when are we going to get the hikes?”

Then the Head of HR (who is in the room), who reports to the CEO (who is literally sitting next to them), tells us that they are evaluating macro parameters and doing industry analysis to bridge pay parity and give equitable hikes to top performers while still giving inflation-linked hikes as a base line to everyone. They’ll tell you they’re waiting for management to allocate a budget and they’re working with the CFO (the person sitting next to the CEO) to create a payment plan and that they’ll get back to you as soon as they have the clarity. 🫡

This entire AHM could be one single email. It would’ve saved hours of mental frustration. The only thing I learn from the AHM is that the company has money, but they won’t give it to you because yolo and I also learn the art of speaking a lot of words without conveying anything. 🫡

Relevant Video: Doublespeak, how to lie without lying? https://youtu.be/qP07oyFTRXc?si=0UUcLTfRH7wwCGiq

Very useful if you’ve to get into Management.