#corporateculture

Rumor is that the offers are delayed by at least 1 week! Not a surprise, HR failed to secure the required approvals from Exxon executives for the offers, and some of them are enjoying their holidays till next week! Again, corporate separateness, my a.. !

Hybrid Creep ! We had WFH. We had RTO. Now, meet "hybrid creep," - The idea is that a combination of carrots and sticks will encourage people to gradually increase their in-office time without explicitly telling them to do so. That means tactics like basing promotions on office attendance, or increasing surveillance of employees or Increasing layoffs.
There’s a meaningful difference between saying “we believe we’re better together” and secretly counting phones in a building.

• One is a point of view, whether it’s right or wrong.
• The other is surveillance dressed up as management.
  Don’t be surprised if corporate culture collapses when leaders stop trusting adults to behave like adults.
  The combination of factors seems to be working: Office attendance rates are rising steadily, even as many firms take a step back from mandates.
  https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/workplace/hybrid-work-return-to-office-creep-af5a62b5

Years later and this abomination of a name is still struggling to gain traction. News flash, it never will. We’re never going to make progress with this name. It drags us down like an anchor and reflects poorly on both shareholders and teammates. In all these years, I haven’t met a single person outside the bank who doesn’t mock it. Even today, years later, the legacy names still have greater brand recognition and consumer trust - and they don't even exist anymore. Leadership needs to grow a pair and change back to one of the legacy names, even if it is to have a corporate structure like Meta/Facebook. I am a legacy teammate, and I don't care which one. Just pick one. They are both good names.

He only has $700 million. We need to get him to a billion.

Your company lacks corporate transparency. Modern forward looking companies practice social responsibility with ESG transparency. In 2026, Rich'
Board needs to get into the 21st century with basic corporate norms. Transparency boots employee morale, confidence, and helps the company address and allocate resources better:

++Full Annual Report w/full audit financials & audit report++
++Corporate Executive Compensation Policy & Disclosures Published w/compensation for all SVPs and above by name & amount++
++Publish Board of Directors Compensation along with outside business interests++
++Summary of Board Minutes & Agendas++
++Board of Directors required to provide update to employees and to meet w/employees & clients through focus groups each quarter++
++Publish Annual Filing w/NYDFS w/all schedules on public website++
++Publish 5 year strategic plan to all employees++
++Post Corporate Tax Return on public website++
++Post all pages of the full un redacted rating agencies reports on the public website++
++require all internal leaders of divisions to hold quarterly meetings with all of their divisions and employees especially in IT, Sales, & Operations++
++Human Resources needs to release all results of Annual Employee Culture Survey within 1 month of survey completion++ no sitting on the survey results.
++360 feedback by associates of their managers and their managers managers++

Remember, the cover up is worse than the crime and it's time to stop covering up. This is not Watergate.

For those in Corporate Risk.

by Nov 15 - performance calibration within group.
by Nov end - managers enter compensation.

By Dec 9 - DF calibration.

Jan 1 - 28 politics and favoritism on the bonus amount for team members.
Jan 28 bonus discussion to team members.

Feb 13 bonus payment

Welcome to BNY Mellon, the corporate funhouse where the future is offshored, the present is gaslit, and the past has been quietly escorted out under a PIP engineered by someone who couldn’t explain your job if their bonus depended on it. If you’ve ever wanted to experience a workplace that feels like a psychological thriller written by a committee of auditors with no moral compass, congratulations—you’re already included.

Let’s begin with the crown jewel: the 1.4‑million‑square‑foot Pune facility, a gleaming monument to cost‑cutting and the executive fantasy that geography equals talent. Walk inside and you’ll hear it—the cha‑ching of budget wins echoing like a slot machine that only pays out when a U.S. employee vanishes from the payroll.
Real estate consolidation? Cha‑ching. Offshoring? Cha‑ching. RTO badge‑tracking designed to catch you missing a swipe? Cha‑ching. Eliminating work from home so you can sit in a ghost‑town office lit by flickering fluorescent lights? Cha‑ching.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., seasoned employees are being funneled into the Performance Improvement Program Funhouse—a place where your accomplishments are reinterpreted as “concerning behaviors,” your loyalty becomes “inflexibility,” and your manager suddenly develops selective amnesia about every positive review you’ve ever received. We are told it's business, not personal; it’s “People Optimization.” Or, as everyone else calls it: age discrimination with a corporate mission statement.

Your replacement? Already hired. They’re either a contractor, an H1B, or a freshly minted state college grad whose primary qualification is generating tax incentives. Nothing screams “strategic workforce planning” like swapping a 25‑year veteran for someone new who still puts “proficient in Outlook” on their résumé.

And then there’s leadership—RV and Dermie—delivering explanations so vague they might as well be fortune‑cookie messages. “Secular headwinds.” “Strategic acceleration.” “Industry realignment.” These phrases translate directly to: We cut people because it was cheaper, and we hope you’re too demoralized to question it.
They’re corporate illusionists, pulling rabbits out of hats while quietly sawing the workforce in half, all while congratulating themselves for their “courageous leadership.”
But the real horror isn’t the layoffs—it’s the cultural decay and phony empathy. Not a dramatic collapse, but a daily drip of rot. Policies drafted by people who have never met an employee. Decisions that feel like they were generated by a malfunctioning ethics simulator. And the atmosphere? Imagine a place where hope goes to file a ticket with HR and never returns. You are told to recharge, yet you quickly realize your battery no longer holds a charge.

Employees describe it as a slow‑motion freefall: one day you’re standing on a cliff, the next you’re knee‑deep in gravel wondering when the ground gave out. Every new policy feels like it was written by someone who only vaguely understands what the company does. Every leadership message arrives wrapped in jargon, dipped in legal review, and delivered with the emotional warmth of The Grinch who has no integrity and has lost their soul.

And if you’re wondering where ethical concerns go—well, they don’t go to RV. They simply vanish into corporate legal and a maze of executives who nod solemnly while approving fake performance reviews to support a visa‑driven displacement model. There’s evidence everywhere for those willing to look, but the official stance remains a polished shrug.

The downstream effects are already here: institutional knowledge evaporating, teams hollowing out, and the remaining employees expected to train their replacements while pretending everything is “energizing.” Engagement surveys now function mostly as a cry‑for‑help collection system.

But don’t worry—leadership wants you to feel valued. So check under your seat. If you’re lucky, you might find a BNY keychain in a swag bag. A small token of appreciation for your loyalty, your decades of service, and your willingness to participate in the grand experiment of replacing experience with cost efficiency.

In the end, BNY’s transformation story is simple:
Cut enough people, hide enough truth, and eventually even the spreadsheets start believing the fairy tale.

Happy New Year! Enjoy the feeling while it lasts.

My hopes and dreams of waking up to the news that GM has been fired are dwindling.

I’m starting to realize that GM most likely made a deal with Elliott Management to be a “bendover, yes sir can I have another, puppet stringed sellout”. If this is the most likely scenario then we are in for long, long dismal time at MDT.

Where do ethical concerns at this firm end up in leadership - seeking a name that isnt RV. There are insidious tactics being applied to domestic employees at this time which will have prolific downstream consequences. There is proof abound certain execs are complicit with fake performance reviews under a visa and 3rd party displacement model.

Please write your government representatives if you see it too, or have worked with McKinsey on these models in the past.

"At this time, the Company anticipated that workforce reductions will occur in phases, or waves over the coming months," the company wrote in the letter, which was signed by Lisa V. Chang, executive vice president and global chief people officer.

https://www.11alive.com/article/news/local/coca-cola-announces-plans-for-corporate-layoffs-in-atlanta/85-043a3b21-a30b-4c66-8603-0e9a953f8ced

I’ve watched a steady parade of senior leaders come and go, and after a while it hits you that there aren’t any truly new ideas. It’s the same playbook over and over, just repackaged with fresh buzzwords and a shiny new label. I can’t count how many times I’ve thought, we tried this five or ten years ago, they’re just calling it something different now. Once you’ve been around long enough, the pattern is impossible to ignore.

Should Dell be included?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlhrhhcLlaI

Corporations Viewpoint -

Of any employee.

The Bottom Line.

Remember this, always.

Employees are considered an (Expendable) line item due to Cost of Salary, and Benefits.

Corporations Viewpoint -

Of any employee.

The Bottom Line.

Remember this, always.

Employees are considered an (Expendable) line item due to Cost of Salary, and Benefits.

Yes. Next question.

https://nypost.com/2025/12/27/us-news/dad-of-slain-cvs-worker-edeedson-cine-said-son-spent-final-morning-with-family-before-fatal-shift/

Absolutely horrible response by this company towards law enforcement and the victims property considering this happened at one of their stores on Christmas.

Hans used 5G to try and distract us from reality. Dan is using AI. The long term plan is not dictated by either of these technologies and while the changes and headcount reduction are part of a plan, we will not know what that plan is until it happens. A sell off? A shut down of all stores and migration to resellers? Moving wireline work to the newly acquired Frontier team? We don't know.

What we do know is the constant gaslighting over the years that has become nauseating. Telling us we have the best network and customer service when customers tell us the opposite?

Layoffs will resume Q1 of 2026. I am ready and waiting for my number to be pulled. With the writing clearly on the wall, how many people will be back on this website panicking because they did nothing to prepare for the inevitable? I hope it's a minimal amount but some will be blinded by a new year and an attempt at Q1 kick off meetings to distract the easily distracted.

We have a week left of 2025. Once the clock turns midnight, the peace and quiet is over and the cycle will start again.

Ask questions, ask for clarification when the answer doesn't make sense, and remember you are not valued as a person, you are a dispensable number and will be treated as such very soon. Meanwhile, our executives are raking in millions, annually.

Dan Schulman

Verizon Compensation (2025 onwards)
Base Salary: $1.5 million annually.
Short-Term Incentive: Target of 250% of base salary (prorated for 2025).
Long-Term Incentives (Equity): RSU/PSU grants with target values potentially reaching $9.5M and $20M, vesting over time.
Total Potential: Can reach nearly $60 million, depending on performance.

Word is, Director level and up gave themselves a Christmas bonus this year quietly.. you know for all the hard work they did!

This has all of the signs of getting primed to find a buyer. Shed thousands upon thousands of highly compensated employees with 20+ years of tenure. No rhyme or reason to the ones chosen other than they are too costly to the bottom line. Not looking at the individual persons to see what value they bring to the organization; just treating them as nothing more than a line item on a spreadsheet. Welcome to the new Corporate America. Shareholders are the most important people; no longer the customer (internal or external).
Remember when they used to say "our employees are our greatest asset." Well, they don't say that anymore. They finally realized people are not assets, because they don't own them. People are free to take their talents elsewhere. You also don't layoff assets. People should never be treated like tangible objects.
After the 13K depart, try and make sense of a wounded and abandoned organization that's left with huge holes. Good luck to the ones that are left behind to clean up the mess. Try and pick up the pieces and keep your head above water until you can find the right buyer.
Your largest expense is employee payroll. Shed as much as you possibly can to attract the right buyer.
Just my two cents (pun intended).

Don’t know if anyone has seen the videos but there’s a big potential criminal case forming against PayPal and their subsidiary honey for multiple charges in more than 20+ class action lawsuits. Honey was acquired by PayPal in 2019/2020 for $4 billion when Schulman was still CEO. Investigative journalists have brought to light dirt on both sides primarily due to Honeys practices which now trickle under the PayPal umbrella/leadership.

Do you think this potentially is the reason some higher ups at PayPal are getting a free ticket out and coming here in case any action gets taken against PayPal? Does this question the new leadership at VZ?

While Verizon has a long history of failed execution from go90, aol, yahoo, hum, finance transformation, VGS, blue jeans, plus play, and even something as simple as RTO - Verizon does succeed at empty catch phrases. Better matters! Change energizes us! Go beyond! I’m anxious to learn what catch phrase our overlords will rally us around next.

I keep seeing people say “we are returning to working in the office because that’s how it always was”

Quick question - who had issues finding assigned seating, food, and stocked bathrooms with good toilet paper before covid?

Answer - nobody. Because RTO is not a return to how it was. It is way greedier and designed to be humiliating on purpose. Quit licking boots and be honest.

Canon's declining market share and toxic corporate culture isn't just in the US. China is no different! The Zhuhai and Zhongshan factories have closed. Canon China sales company is laying off employees every year. the CEO and the Japanese managers are very much into the a-s-kissing culture. This This Retired managers continue to be promoted, middle level cadres are laid off as much as possible, and younger employees are bullied. This is the worst company I have ever seen.

A post making the rounds has similarities to a certain company…..

Starbucks did not lose $30 billion because of bad coffee. It lost it because the company
mispriced what actually created its value. When Starbucks appointed a McKinsey-trained executive as CEO, the mandate was operational discipline. Costs were scrutinized. Processes were standardized. Stores were pushed to behave like efficiency machines rather than community spaces.

On paper, the logic made sense. Consultants optimize margins by removing friction. But
Starbucks was never a pure efficiency business. Its premium pricing depended on brand emotion, store experience, and cultural loyalty. Those are intangible assets, but they carry real monetary value.

As efficiency initiatives rolled out, customers noticed. Service quality declined. Stores felt
transactional. The brand lost its emotional moat. Foot traffic softened. Growth expectations reset.

Markets reacted quickly. Over 17 months, Starbucks shed roughly $30 billion in market
capitalization. Not from insolvency risk, but from a reassessment of future cash flows tied to brand strength.

The board reversed course. The CEO exited. Strategy changed.

The wealth lesson is structural. Consulting frameworks work best where value is mechanical and repeatable. Consumer brands compound wealth through trust, identity, and habit, not just margins.

When leadership optimizes the wrong variable, scale turns small misjudgments into massive losses.

Starbucks did not fail at execution. It failed at understanding what it was actually selling.

All of the boomers on here will tell you that you are fortunate and should be grateful for the opportunity you have to work for a company, blah...blah. The reality is that none of us matter to any company, and none of us have ever mattered. The entire system is built to keep us indebted to, and dependent on, corporations. I consider myself politically very conservative, and I am not afraid to admit this. America was sold out long ago. We haven't had a true free market economy for at least 50 years or more. Everything that is done now is done to enrich corporations and political leaders. Banks and financial companies are some of the worst exploiters of the American people in existence. As long as we are indebted just to live, we can't ever be truly free.

Yesterday, leadership stated that individual contributors will remain the primary model moving forward, and the entire organizational hierarchy is under review. There's talk from the C-suite about increasing the number of doors per RDM to between 20 and 30. At the same time, it appears they're planning to reduce the workforce by at least 20%, which would effectively double (and in some cases triple) the workload for remaining individual contributors. This comes at a time when these teams are already significantly reduced and stretched thin. It's frustrating to hear executives celebrate strong performance while simultaneously pushing for deep staff cuts. This feels like pure corporate greed on T-Mobile's part.

Imagine all the money our SVPs and exec staff make and Bain still runs the company. A substantial number of decisions are all based off Bain recommendations. We could save millions upon millions of dollars if we got rid of most of our SVP layer kept some of our VPs and kept our Sr and Director layers and just used Bain.

Otherwise why do we need SVPs who are totally incapable of making decisions without Bain?

My manager just kinda informed us in a soft way that the budget is tight and layoffs are probably pending. She says that I am a corporate employee but I am working under a states plan. When layoffs happen, do corporate employees get cut too or that particular plan.

Haven’t they heard that this particular phrase went out of fashion? They can’t even keep up with corporate fluff.

Did you all see the email the other day? I cannot keep up with the changes anymore. I also heard of a shakeup for the HMS people. Top heavy folks leaving over there and huge re-org changes. I have never seen a company like this!

expect several months worth of small, targeted little potshots and pruning to avoid more bad PR and WARN, etc. hopefully some bigger changes will come at the top level.

What Dan Schulman is proposing isn’t new. You can find old videos of Tami Irwin bragging about how customer centric we’ve become and old videos of Shankar Arumugavelu bragging about how much gen AI has improved things.

We’ve had reorgs that didn’t make much sense every year and a slew of executives who overpromised , underdelivered, and then moved on. Hans, Ronnan Dunne, Manon Brouillette, Shankar, Linda Avery, Diego Scotti, etc…

It’s been years since I’ve worked for other companies. There were problems but I don’t remember it being this bad. I’m worried this might be the new standard in corporate America.

What a joke of a management committee, board of directors and the government for letting a US company bring IOL (100 year old company) to the s**.

What happened to corporate separateness? Now TG and DW have plans to exploit Canadian molecules, hose the minority interest investors (upwards of $500M of value based on rough estimates) and set up a wholly owned shell Trading shop in Canada in 2026.

Again, is the IOL board of directors asleep? Critical jobs are being migrated south to Houston at a higher cost and at the same time decimating fundamental knowledge that’s required for any stand alone O&G company which is a huge risk. How about the provincial and federal governments? Canadian taxable income is about to be stripped for the US to benefit. At this rate, all weak leadership contributing to this mess should be managed out of India in the “Global Hub”based on the lack of long term value they bring to the company and how far they are from the real Canadian business.

@ the government and BoD - wake up and block this immoral trade shop from starting up and exploiting Canadian molecules at the expense of the independent shareholders. Audit the s*** out of any proposals being presented including risk to long term value to the company. The move of Calgary head office to Strathcona Refinery and lack of diligence assessing the econs and long term risk to the company due to losing its top talent was already a disgrace.

I think belk is trying to do better

I’m sure I’m gonna get slammed for this post, but I heard belk has gotten so much negative publicity for their store operations that they are trying to do better. Hometown stores seem to have it the toughest, while mall and golden stores have a less demanding workload for each employee.

I certify don’t want to see belk suffer, it’s an iconic part of North Carolina.

I do think they are slowly realizing that some of their managers and corporate leadership are toxic.

Srini?

If people are worried about more layoffs so close to Christmas, you know something is seriously wrong with BofA.

100+ LAID off today no rhyme or reason lots of tears

The company should feel ashamed of themselves for the way they conduct business! The worst company on this planet for sure!

Another week of high profile corporate exits. Head of channel (VP) out after just 5-6 months in the job. 5th channel leader in 18 months. Replaced by 2 senior directors.

Marketing leader leaving Dec 31.

It seems that this reorg was mainly corporate. Very little in the field (sorry to those impacted). It went from building consolidation, massive layoffs etc to very few. If this is the end FOR NOW they should announce that.