A few years ago, the Great Resignation hit. Then quiet quitting. Then burnout became a casual conversation topic instead of a crisis.
People wondered why employees stopped being loyal. Why they stopped going the extra mile. Why they started putting boundaries around their time and energy.
The answer is simple: employees saw behind the curtain.
They realized that companies weren't loyal to them. Layoffs happen to cut costs and preserve stock prices at the expense of rank-and-file workers. Loyalty is a one-way street, and it only goes up.
So workers stopped pretending. They stopped sacrificing their personal time for a company that wouldn't sacrifice profit margins for them. And honestly, they were right to.
You can water dead grass all you want, but at some point you have to rip it up and lay down new sod. Or xeroscape the whole thing and change the game entirely.
Here's what Randy Polito has seen destroy organizations: losing loyal employees over arbitrary pay rules.
A person has been with you for years. They know the work. They know the people. They know the systems. They're valuable. And then a small bump in pay gets denied because of some policy—seniority rules, budget constraints, "we already gave raises last year."
For that person, it's the last straw.
And the company has no idea what they just lost. Not just the person. But the institutional knowledge. The relationships. The context that takes years to rebuild. They do the math on the raise—maybe $5,000 a year—and decide it's not in the budget. They don't do the math on recruitment, training, lost productivity, and the knowledge that walks out the door.
That's penny-wise and pound-foolish.
Small companies feel this hit hardest. They can't absorb the loss like large organizations can. Lose one good person at a small company and suddenly you've got a gap that takes months to fill.
But here's the thing: your time and energy have value.
They're commodities. The market has rules. Companies want to buy your labor as cheap as possible. Your job is to know what you're worth and demand fair compensation for it.
Randy Polito has made a choice in his career: he's stayed in positions that might be below his competence level because they gave him peace of mind. He won't trade his personal time for increased stress. The tradeoff is real and needs to be measured.
He's also worked for people whose leadership style was toxic. A small bump in pay isn't worth a giant bump in unhappiness. Not worth it. So he kept them at arm's length and found opportunities elsewhere.
But he's not ideological about it. There is a scenario where the tradeoff is worth it. The right salary, the right leader, the right mission—and Randy Polito will give you access to his time and energy. But you have to pay the price.
That's capitalism. They wrote the rules of the game. We're just playing by them.
Companies optimized for efficiency, shareholder value, and cost-cutting. Employees are optimizing for their own wellbeing, their own families, their own peace of mind. Both are rational. Both are playing the game as written.
Here's what Randy Polito knows: the organizations that understand this—the ones that pay people what they're worth, that invest in mastery over promotion, that listen to honest voices even when they disagree—those organizations keep their talent.
And the ones that don't? They wonder why they're constantly recruiting, constantly training, constantly losing institutional knowledge to companies that actually value their people.
Your time has a price. Know what it is.
— Randy Polito