Chapter 2: Rough Waters

On Monday morning Austin was up earlier than normal. Tonya had decided that with the cooler temps she was going to take the kids for a week-long trip to her parents’ house outside of St. Louis. The eight hour drive would be bearable for them now that the weather was in the seventies. Tonya wanted to be on the road by 6:00 AM so she would arrive in the early afternoon, but by the time the car was packed, the kids corralled, and Austin satisfied one last time before she was to be gone for a week, she didn’t pull out of the driveway until almost 7:30. Even so, and with a liberal eight-hour travel estimate, she should still arrive in St. Louis by mid-afternoon.

Austin had risen and dressed along with his wife. When she left he went straight to the office and logged into his work computer at 7:30, which was about an hour earlier than his usual routine. Normally, he would get up and shower and shave on a Monday morning. With the pandemic he worked from home and only showered once or twice a week. He figured Monday was always a good day to get the week started afresh.

His first task was always to check his email and calendar. Today there were two surprises. There had been rumors that the executive management team would ease the restrictions of working in the office now that a vaccine was readily available. The first email he saw seemed to confirm this suspicion.

“Return to the Office,” read the subject line.

He clicked on the email and read that the number of cases in South Bend and surrounding counties had decreased the past three weeks so the office was going to reopen starting in one week. Everyone was encouraged to only work in the office as needed to start. The email also stated that there would be a new arrangement of desks to help social distancing, but that the office would be open for business.

The second email that caught his attention was entitled, “Company Wide All Hands.” There was usually an all hands meeting every quarter or two, but this time when he saw the email he got a funny feeling in his stomach. He clicked.

The email was brief. “Join us tomorrow, Tuesday, at 10:00 AM for a company-wide all hands meeting in which the executive team will make several announcements.”

Austin took a deep breath and then sighed loudly. He was the most tenured member of his team, even though he had only been with the company for four years. He vividly recalled the environment he entered when he first started. The company had just executed its first ever layoff. His boss at the time had been surprisingly forward with him in the interview process with what had transpired the month before.

Austin remembered the conversation verbatim.

“Yeah, last month, the executive team looked at the whole company. They track all kinds of performance metrics as well as costs per division. Where there are overruns they look at how the difference can be reconciled, for example, by shifting team members from one team to another. They realized that in the past eighteen months our hiring standards had dipped with the rapid growth, and there was a small percentage of people that were floating without contributing their due share, even after working on more than one team. Of the sixty employees in the company, seven were let go, which evened out all the numbers.”

Austin didn’t know how to respond so the hiring manager answered his unspoken question.

“The CEO promised that if our sales continued to outpace our expenses there would be a minimum of a three year window before any kind of layoff would occur again. He also stressed that if you do your job and show your worth, you have no need to worry. Now or in the future.”

In his head, Austin knew he was safe if this latest email was indeed the precursor to another layoff. When his former director left the company (on his own volition), there was a second small team that was also in need of a leader. The VP decided to hire a people-manager with no expertise in either team’s field. No one was really happy, but it did give everyone on each team more freedom than a boss that micro-managed. Austin was the unofficial leader in his team of five. Along with being the titular head of the group, he also received the highest average ratings when customers were surveyed.

The other team’s current “lead” was not in such a comfortable position. About six months ago his father passed away and he never really engaged in his job after returning from the funeral. Instead, he relied on his three teammates to carry the load and he just coasted on their coattails.

Austin sighed again and thought, “If there was ever a time to feel engaged and show productivity, it’s now.” He continued working through the email that arrived over the weekend and then dove into a presentation he started to write on Friday. It was going to be a mid-year review of his team’s progress. It couldn’t come at a better time.

At 8:30 that evening his cell phone rang the opening bars of Lady by Styx. He had set the custom ring tone for Tonya’s number.

“Hello,” he enthusiastically said into the phone.

“Hello, back to you,” Tonya said. “What has you so chipper?”

Austin collapsed against the back of the sofa as realized how tightly wound he had been all day. He knew he couldn’t bullshit Tonya. She’d see right through any pretense he offered. Instead he took a deep breath and jumped right into the big news of the day.

“I got two emails this morning. The first was expected. We can start going back into the office starting next week.”

“OK, that was what you expected. Maybe a week or two earlier than you would have guessed, but no big deal.” Clearly Tonya knew this wasn’t the news that had her husband worked up.