Hi everyone. This may be a long one but I feel like I need other perspectives on this as I’m fearing the worst.
Context: I have worked at this marketing company for almost 3 years now. We started as a team of 10 people but, over the years, we have been reduced to 5. Never had I received a comment on the amount of work I did and my Team Lead always seemed happy with the work I produced and my results. I always made sure that the work that was assigned to me was completed on time and rarely have I missed any deadlines. They even tasked me with some special projects so I had a feeling of trust with them.
A couple of things to note: Lately they have been introducing AI tools to assist and make our work more efficient. They have asked us to test them and provide feedback. They say it will free us up from doing mundane tasks and focus more on “creative, stratetgic, high-level tasks” but we have not seen this type of tasks arrive. Also, the bulk of our work comes from a department I’ll name VV. Members from VV upload tasks to our platform and we complete them.
Cue to today. My Team Lead has a 1:1 with me where they explain that upper management has detected that my activity numbers have gone down. I’m guessing there is a way upper management is able to track VM activity however I am not shown any numbers or data to back this up. Now, I have observed that the amount of tasks our team is being sent has slowed down dramatically this year (I suspect that this due to the economic situation of the world and the type of work we do, aka. marketing campaigns, tends to be deprioritized in this climate but that’s another story). I still complete all of the work that is assigned to me and spend the rest of the time doing additonal research or going over past reports to identify trends and so on. This involves a lot of reading and thinking so I guess the activity on the VM is not considered high enough.
I explain this to my Team Lead and they say that I should ask for more work if I have the capacity as “sometimes the VV team has work that they forget to upload to our platform so we can always check with them.” This made me raise an eyebrow because why is it falling on us to remind them to do their job? If it was important, this would be negatively impacting client satisfaction and productivity no? But anyway, I just reassured my Team Lead that I will check with them more often if there’s some work to be done when I’m done with my tasks.
Then out of nowhere they mention that “if I had other priorities or concerns and I wanted to cut my working hours, I could, as one of our team members was going to only work half days from now on”. Note that we are contractors paid by the hour so deciding to cut your days in half, effectively halving your pay, is something I would consider only under very dire circumstances and this team member has not given us a heads-up about this, which is rare as it affects the delegation of tasks. This definitely made an alarm sound in my head but I just told her that I would let them know if such a situation arose.
Given all circumstances, my mind is leaning towards thinking that a majority if not all of our team is being made redundant and this productivity/activity metric is being used as a justification. However, I’m not sure if it’s worth pointing out to my Team Lead my concerns about this activity/productivity situation; the reduced number of tasks we are receiving, the use of AI to “speed up” the tasks we do get, how we have to ask other teams for more work. I feel like it should be obviuous why activity is down yet I feel they are aware of this and are just building a trail to justify the dissolution of our team. I guess I’m just going a bit crazy over this haha
Anyways, I would love to hear your thoughts about this or if you’ve had similar experiences. Thank you.
submitted by /u/JoeKr98
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