Corporate thought also simultaneously believes the reverse:

Things aren't getting done? The team that went from 11 members to 3 while their incoming work rate tripled must not be working hard enough. We should consider outsourcing.

My last place used to do position budgeting based on previous year's pay hours. Which may sound good on paper for stable departments but...

2016: 4 people in the position who worked fulltime throughout the year. Their budget for 2017 is 4.0

2017: 1 employee left in July. But due to bureaucracy it took 6 months to even try to get the position posted. Calculated pay hours for the year were 3.5 so that's the employee budget for 2018.

2018: 3 employees still in the position doing the workload of 4. In February the position finally gets to the employment board but since their budget is 3.5 they're only approved to post a part-time position. Takes 4 months to get it posted, applicants and interviews. By August the position is finally filled with a part-time worker. One of the original 3 is finally sick of the BS and leaves in October. Calculated pay hours is 2.95 for the year and so budgeted 3.0 for 2019.

2019: Current budget is 3.0, they try to get approval to backfill the employee who left in October but current staffing is 2.5, they won't allow 2 PT employees so they're able to negotiate converting the PT to FT, which becomes effective in April. Calculating payroll throughout the year with the status change, the budget going into 2020 is 2.8 which means they'll never get back to 4 employees.

This is a VERY realistic scenario which lead to once easy going departments becoming staffed with burned out, bitter employees.

It comes down to assuming that just because two things have the same unit and "magnitude" they must be equal/fungible. Some things are. People are not. Days are often not. But this sort of oversimplification is everywhere in corporate thought. People being paid tons of money to assume you get the same output from an experienced employee and one who just finished training.

Not all corporate thought. Some corporations actually listen, even if it's not cool to say on lemmy. I for one don't hate my job, the company is coll and my boss is actually nice. Same with my previous company, I still hang out with my old boss from time to time.

Corporate culture is patriarchal. If it doesn't put everyone into a hierarchy where they're forced to subjugate themselves then that can't work because that's against the emotional reason the bosses got the job in the first place.

It’s because people don’t know how to draw boundaries, and perhaps will get replaced with the sheep that says yes to everything. (?)

Management pushes contradictory narratives as it suits them, while doing nothing to monitor actual work, which they know very little about. Just a priesthood of MBAs chanting catechisms invented out of thin air to justify their laziness.

Personnel department sounds so much neater.

A lot of places also stopped calling their employees “employees” and started calling them “associates”. What’s up with that?

Yeah I hate it, it sounds exactly like the worm-tongued bureaucrat-speak that it is. Orwell wrote about exactly this kind on nonsense in Politics and the English Language and it is as true as ever today.

I'm okay with it being called HR, because it's the more honest term for what it is.

It's now being referred to as Human Capital