[r053bud]

I will always want honesty from the company I work for. If they pull something like this, trust is completely lost and I’ll be looking elsewhere. If I were in charge, I’d admit our mistakes (we over hired, didn’t foresee economic conditions, invested in the wrong areas) which caused the need for layoffs. I’d never tell my employees that there would be no layoffs unless I was 100% certain of it.

[skeeter2020]

Looking for honesty from a company is kind of silly when you think about it... it's a pathological, amoral entity with a single, well-defined legal purpose, afforded some notion of human rights. Executives are legally obligated to serve it. They can provide honest analysis after the fact but early notice is a mistake, even if it means lying to you.

[jbay808]

Trust, which is instrumentally valuable, is the wage earned by honesty. Even a pathological, amoral entity will find value in being honest, unless they assign no value to being trusted.

[chii]

The company entity will not trust their employees generally. They verify, or use multiple parties to prevent any possible trust needed to perform a task - that's why there's "supervisors" and manager roles.

The employees, on the other hand, is required to trust the company. It's a condition of employment. For example, you are only paid after the work is completed - this requires that the employee trusts the company to make good on the wage. Of course, this is legally mandated - but sometimes, despite legal mandates, unpaid wages exists, esp. when company is in financial trouble.

It's an asymmetrical relationship.

[jbay808]

I mean trust in a communications sense: the amount that a listener believes your message when you say something. The purpose of communication is, ultimately, to change minds. If your audience has lost all trust in you, then your message will be treated as complete noise, and regardless of whether you say X or Y, it will have zero impact on a listener's belief about X or Y.

If your trusted friend says "I'm in trouble and I need a loan", you probably believe them. If a spam email says the same thing, you probably won't.

Employers and employees are on an equal footing in terms of this type of trust. Whether you're speaking to your senior manager or to your new hire, you need to establish that your words carry factual meaning. Fail repeatedly at that, and you'll end up on a mental spam filter.

When Enzersdorfer-Konrad says "There will not be any kind of massive layoffs within Bitpanda", the impact of that message on employees is proportional to how much trust Enzersdorfer-Konrad, and Bitpanda, have earned. If they have a record of lying and deceiving their employees, then such announcements are complete noise. There's not even any use in uttering them.

Telling such a blatant lie -- or, to be charitable, an overconfident wrong prediction -- costs credibility that has to be earned back the hard way. The next time Enzersdorfer-Konrad says something, even if he really means it this time, it won't carry weight. He'll have to build, or rebuild, a strong record of honesty before people listen to him again.

[jenny91]

There are plenty of societies where the people hold companies up to standards other than just maximal exploitation for shareholder value. It doesn't have to be that way.

[daniel-cussen]

Yeah and they could avoid layoffs if they cut the executive pay down.