There is a bleak general atmosphere. I haven't met anyone who is putting in more work than it's required of them. Everyone is doing their job just enough to not get fired, which suggests a lack of passion, and it's due to the way employees are viewed by management. The arrangement is such that anyone can be let go at the drop of a hat, which makes it all the more difficult to reach a state of mental comfort conducive of focus and performance. There is no actual motivating factor other than that weekly paycheck. Their mantra is to improve by 25% each quarter, which is utter disregard for basic limitation of human biology. It's ok to push yourself, but everything plateaus at some point. In the weekly department meetings, we get the news that the performance bar is moving up, and the rhetoric is pretty much based on all the many ways in which we can fail. If you generate a word cloud from the meeting transcripts, which I do, the word "fail" will almost always show up front and center. For as long as I've been around, in all the meetings, we are presented with the point "if you don't like it, hit the road".
The products we are supporting are B2B solutions with complex architecture. Each one of them requires advanced knowledge of different tool sets, in addition to the product itself. The latest policy is to have every support agent know about 15 of these things. It's a proven scientific and historic fact that specialization leads to better performance, yet this management is pushing for broadening of the scope, just so that there is uniformity, and consequently, everyone is expandable. It's not a very comforting feeling, dear I say bordering on soul-consuming.