It’s always “desperate times”. Otherwise they don’t trust the workforce to actually do their jobs.

I know my work is so baffled when they actually have someone with a passion for the job. Despite being amazing and super easy to “manage”, they’ve managed to screw over some of our best to drive them to leave while favoring some exceptionally mediocre people. Sycophants, braggarts, and people who generally game the arbitrary crap prevail over passion and talent.

So manufactured crises to get people to thrash around and give some appearance of “value”, for lack of being able to understand let alone retain good workers.