#culture

About time some have decided enough is enough of this joke of a company. Have some pride and do better for you and your family.

advantages/disadvantages of now informing your PL (you have a great relationship with. Mutual respect). Common courtesy?

Qualcomm's whole culture is built on insular thinking. They hire people right out of school and those people never leave. So promotions happen based on seniority, not ability. Those in charge think the way we do things is the only way. And now they're making terrible decisions. No surprises there.

I was laid off from USB after 15 years of strong performance. It was really hard especially at 50. But I adapted and landed a better job in a difference industry, smaller company and I’m really happy here.

Occasionally, when I see a LinkedIn headline about someone leaving USB I’ll come here to see if they’re still laying off at the same pace. You’re not going to like this, but I want to be blunt with you for your own good.

The endless debate on here about return-to-office policies must be a very useful barometer to the leadership as they make decisions about headcount and offshoring.

The one thing you all agree on is that this is the darkest point in USB history. Okay. I don’t know about that, the stock price higher than it’s been in years. But let’s say you’re right. So during crisis, you all want to focus on d-mb stuff like how much will I have to go in to an office? Which days count? What’s the minimum I can do and remain employed? That tells me there is plenty of mediocrity left at USB and they should keep cutting.

If your primary concern is whether you have to spend two or three days in an office, you are focusing on the wrong thing.You have choices. Level up. Learn faster. Contribute more. Build relationships. Become the person people want in the room. Or find a new gig. What doesn’t seem to be working for you is treating office attendance as the defining issue of your professional life.

Let me list what's wrong here. Incompetent leadership. No honesty from the top. Managers who promise one thing and deliver another. A terrible culture. Fear driven by constant cuts. And the only people who get ahead are the ones who know someone. Am I forgetting anything?

I don't get it. Just telling someone to do their work is now seen as aggressive. If you're not constantly praising people, you're being too critical. It's gotten ridiculous.

If you're planning to leave (and who isn't, right?) here's some advice from someone who's been around. Pay and title matter, but culture and environment matter even more. I focused too much on the first two and ignored the rest. Don't make the same mistake.

If you're smart, you should have been actively looking and applying for a job from the start of the year, if not sooner. No one is safe here, and I think that's been blatantly telegraphed for a while now. This is not the same company I joined 15 years ago, that's for sure.

1. She keeps pushing for outside talent that have no idea what we do. Associates and clients just want results not supposed big name! Are we not heavy on top already? You need to keep and bring back former Fiserv talent that know how to keep the lights ON!! That is your path to success. What you are doing shows you do not care and are on your way out!

2. Bank is too big and ineffective, full of non-doers and we are still losing clients. Too many SVPs with no accountability! Sold nothing, keep moving clients from one Core to another and claim victory

3. Credit Union - That leader is a no show. Has a bunch of SVPs that again have no idea what Fiserv does and he is bringing in more to do what??!? He needs to just show up and do the job! He and his band of losers are failing forward over and the circus is not stopping

4. EmFi - does that heavy engine make any money or do anything??

It is going to take Takis too long to figure Dhivya/FIG and these SVPS out. My resume is polished and ready to go. If Fiserv does not care about FIG, why should I any more?!?!?

BisigSCAMno destroyed the company and made this place miserable to work for with Sapience and mandated in office hours, minimum 9 hours a day, five days per week.

Mike Lyons brought back some sanity by offering flexibility with pool of remote work days, number of required in office hours and getting rid of Sapience.

Takis was here working with both CEO. Does anyone know whether he's in the BisigSCAMno camp and will likely reinstitute rigid in office requirements to drive away our remaining talent?

Or is he sane and will likely leave well enough alone by leaving the current flexibility?

Or might be do something different?

Is he the type to care about such things?

Is there anyone on here who actually knows his mentality around these matters?

I have stories from my time working there, I want to hear some stories so I know I’m not the only one!

Uniti is on the path to being the most poorly run company in history. They now are looking for new vice presidents in many departments because they have laid off so many and lost so much revenue they are now in panic restructure while looking to sell the whole company. Pathetic, evil, and stupid, the new Uniti motto

John Stankey became CEO on July 1, 2020.

AT&T stock then: $23.40
AT&T stock today: $22.01

Nearly 6 years later, the stock has delivered a -5.9% total return, or about -1% annually.

Adjusted for inflation, the stock is effectively worth about $17.60 today, implying a ~25% loss over his tenure.

Six years of “leadership”.
Negative returns.
Ongoing talent loss.
Rock bottom morale.
Bottom of the barrel rankings in culture, best places to work, AI readiness, talent, etc.

At some point, you stop arguing about intent and start looking at outcomes. This guy S U C K S !!!

We have to separate fact from opinion.
SF was CFO of WP when FIS acquired WP. She was appointed COO with a primary responsibility of integration of WP and FIS. Integration was so bad FIS paid an additional 950 million in 2022 for acquisition and integration costs. They settled a lawsuit for 210 million associated with the acquisition of WP. Would we agree SF did not properly integrate the two companies?

Next, she is designated as Chief Administrative Officer 2021 to 2022. Primary responsibility included transformation, M&A, and technology. I think all of FIS/WP employees would agree this didn’t happen.

Her reward, appointment as CEO of a Fortune 500 company with experience of only accounting and finance. Company Stock price Dec 16, 2022 was 69.17. Today, it is 37.47. This what 20+ million a year in CEO comp for SF earns you.

When will the firings end? It isn’t ending soon. As part of the agreement with DE Shaw, FIS agreed to 400 million in cost savings. To avoid major disruption in the business and the Warn Act, FIS is laying off people over a three year period.

Follow the money, DE Shaw share sales in subsequent FIS announcements post Dec 2022. They forced these changes. FIS BOD appointments and historical relationships with DE Shaw, Janu Partners and SF. What backroom deals between Goldstein, Ernst and DE Shaw were agreed?

Make it make sense. 20+m a year, stock price free fall, increase in C Suite personnel compared to legacy FIS, advisor fees so high CFO commented on it, nepotism hires with Performance Officer, CAO, HR. What has this C-suite and SF accomplished?

This is the same CEO that created Future Foreward, implemented all these cost savings with promised payouts, delayed payouts, divided up payout over two years and then let people go before payment. This is the FIS culture. A CFO that hates Jacksonville and US culture. A failed CAO from Hertz because they were friends in Cincinnati. BT was her best friend at WP with no accomplishments at FIS. BT is an over priced puppet. Sad part, entire company run by McKinsey.

FIS got what it deserved. SF set out to do what she promised, fire all legacy FIS and the board has done nothing.

Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here.

A pointless organisation (GVS)
Led by a pointless guy (JP)
An all hands that should have been an email. Cringe worthy fake enthusiasm, as a business do better no one cares about his favourite food, Greece or any statue

We deserve terrible leaders when we ask terrible questions

In order to distract from the decline in maintenance needed to achieve minimal bathroom standards we will be classifying all restroom facilities as flex space. If you find a toilet non-functional simply go to another floor.

"Our new research reveals that the objection to any work from home is more likely to be driven by something else entirely: ego.

"The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism — the tendency to be self-centered and entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status — and the more they favored return-to-office mandates.

"Return-to-office mandates fail to increase financial returns. They succeed only in motivating star employees to quit, reducing the satisfaction of those who stay and discouraging new talent from joining."

The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week ~ NYTimes.
June 22, 2026

When the pandemic came to an end, many people who had been working from home assumed they would be allowed to maintain that habit at least a few days a week. But today in the U.S., a third of companies have forced everyone back to the office full time and have banned remote and hybrid work.

Some leaders say they insist on full-time in-person work because it boosts productivity, despite clear evidence that it does not. Others claim it’s about collaboration, creativity or culture. Our new research reveals that the objection to any work from home is more likely to be driven by something else entirely: ego.

Case by case, there may be good reasons for teams to work together in person. As a general rule, though, it turns out that ordering people back to the office full time is a power and status move. It’s a signature strategy of leaders who exhibit narcissistic qualities. They see any kind of remote work as a threat to their authority and admiration. They want to be worshiped at the office altar.

Over the past six years, we’ve studied why some leaders continue to support remote work, while others resist it. We surveyed thousands of executives, middle managers and frontline supervisors on a host of personality traits. When we later asked them about their stances on hybrid and remote work, their answers didn’t correlate with how much they trusted their employees or how much they loved being around people. The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism — the tendency to be self-centered and entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status — and the more they favored return-to-office mandates.
That pattern held for chief executives of Fortune 500 companies. Since we couldn’t directly measure the size of their egos, we measured factors that many previous studies have identified as reliable proxies for narcissism: the sizes of their pay packages, their signatures and their photos in their company reports. (No, the chief executives probably aren’t directly overseeing the page layout, but their underlings have to figure out what will and won’t please the boss.) Commanding outsize compensation and projecting an outsize image sends a message right out of Ron Burgundy’s playbook: I’m kind of a big deal. We found that the higher chief executives scored on this index, the more likely they were to seek power and status by becoming chairmen of their own companies and joining the boards of other companies. These were the chief executives who made the most negative statements about remote and hybrid work during the first two years of the pandemic.

The connection between narcissistic personality traits and wanting people in the office full time is not coincidental — it’s causal. In one experiment, we got leaders to reflect on the role that a bold, assertive ego played in the success of Steve Jobs as Apple’s chief executive and Larry Ellison as Oracle’s. After participating in that exercise, leaders were more likely to oppose remote work.

None of this is to say that individual leaders who reject remote work are necessarily egomaniacs. Many factors influence workplace policies around flexibility. But our data does show that overall, self-centered leaders tend to struggle with the idea of employees making independent choices about where to work. Psychologists have long suggested that narcissism is like a dr-g — it leaves people craving a regular supply of attention and validation. Remote work deprives leaders of access to that supply.

When people aren’t in the office, it’s harder to command and control. Leaders can’t intimidate by hovering over cubicle desks and slamming doors. They can’t establish their dominance by summoning people to a conference room and pounding their fists on the table. They can’t even make direct eye contact to stare people down.

Remote work also prevents leaders from basking in the glow of employee reverence. Instead of standing out in the corner office, leaders are lost in a sea of equal squares on a screen. Instead of rapt attention, they’re met online with boredom, fatigue and interruptions from partners, children and pets. Instead of being showered with immediate gratification, they get glitchy facial expressions and delayed replies. Sycophantic reassurances from employees just don’t have the same effect if they’re on Slack.
Self-centered leaders often respond to these threats by tightening their grip. They declare that people are shirking from home instead of working from home. They threaten to fire people who aren’t on site five days a week.

Rigorous evidence shows that forcing people to come in every day backfires. Take it from studies of over 450 companies and over three million employees: Return-to-office mandates fail to increase financial returns. They succeed only in motivating star employees to quit, reducing the satisfaction of those who stay and discouraging new talent from joining. Experiments at tech companies and nonprofits show that letting people work from home part of the week boosts happiness and decreases turnover by a third — without any cost to performance. In many cases, those employees even get more done, because they don’t have to spend time commuting and don’t get distracted by office interruptions.

There are limits to the benefit of flexible office policies. Research suggests that working from home for more than half the week can be isolating — it’s harder to build connections and cultures. It’s also more difficult to encourage creative collisions, informal learning and mentoring. But it doesn’t take five days a week to accomplish these goals. In fact, it turns out that people are most collaborative and creative when they work remotely part of the week. They can use a day or two at home to focus on individual deep work and reserve the rest of the week for communication and collective problem-solving. It’s well documented that too much togetherness breeds groupthink (not to mention germs). When we spend some time apart, we actually generate more innovative ideas and make smarter decisions.

Hybrid work does have its own challenges for leaders. It’s not fun to try to inspire through a recorded video message or lead a brainstorming session on a digital whiteboard. But to maintain a competitive advantage in an increasingly flexible world, it’s time for leaders to put their egos aside and master the art of managing from afar.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/opinion/office-work-wfh-bosses.html?s

But you are being pit against your peers in the rankings and the distribution is enforced.

Go team!

Executives and their narcissistic egos still can’t accept that the world changed.

Five years after the pandemic, employees have overwhelmingly shown they value flexibility. The data keeps showing hybrid work isn’t going away. Yet some leaders remain obsessed with attendance, visibility, and control instead of results. That’s exactly what we’re seeing at AT&T.

Instead of focusing on performance, productivity, innovation, talent retention, or competitiveness, leadership is focused on presence reports, badge swipes, and making sure people are physically sitting in a building.

The irony is that the people making these decisions are often the same people wondering why morale is collapsing, why experienced employees are leaving, and why younger talent isn’t interested in coming here.

Employees adapted, the workforce adapted, the job market adapted, but this leadership didn’t.

The future of work is flexibility. Every major survey and labor trend points in that direction. Younger companies and younger leaders are embracing hybrid work while companies clinging to rigid mandates are increasingly fighting yesterday’s battle.

AT&T’s leadership continues to act like forcing people into an office five days a week is some competitive advantage. It isn’t, It’s a recruiting and retention disadvantage and a morale disaster

And the longer leadership refuses to acknowledge that reality, the further behind the company falls.

You can force people into a building but you can’t force talented people and the people you want, to stay.

My manager moved to another team so what's the point?? Lol

I'm sure it's not anonymous so does it even matter?

What is the difference between CA and CR?
Serious analysis only ;)

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/opinion/office-work-wfh-bosses.html?unlocked_article_code=1.sFA.uHrM.1WHzzvC4LbNq&smid=url-share

https://hrexecutive.com/inside-meta-layoffs-and-ai-shakeups-have-pushed-morale-to-the-edge/

How low will it go? Thinking back to when it was over 4.0

Remember when Stanky said nobody knew better than him when it came to the media business? Good times.

There were always cuts, that's part of the business. But I didn't expect the culture to change so completely and so fast. I swear, it became toxic almost overnight. The environment is now completely unrecognizable. It'd almost be fascinating, if it didn't affect us all so much.

Now that the passions have settled, can we have a normal, objective conversation about what we can expect from Takis? Not oh, he's the worst or he's the best rhetoric of the past week, but let's see what he actually brings to the table and how it'll affect all of us.

We're doing amazingly well. I think people are just looking for things to stress over. Enjoy this while you can, I'm sure it won't last forever.

What if, and hear me out, leadership focused on growing revenue instead of shrinking headcount? Wouldn't that be something? Too bad nobody here would ever try that.

Everyone - and I mean every single person - on my team is job hunting. Not all with the same urgency, but all of them. Leadership doesn't seem to notice or care. I think we'll see a major exodus of talent as soon as the job market improves even slightly. I bet they notice then.

They want the easy magical solution that uses the cool new flashy thing.

The funny thing? AI can be leveraged by existing or new deterministic automation solutions where applicable. But the leaders making decisions aren't engineers, and have a view that applications can't evolve or add new features. That they have to build something NEW instead to show off and gain notoriety.

And so you get a cycle of projects gaining traction and getting ki-led off.

The competitive nature in which teams have to compete for funding has been a drastic mistake. It is profoundly stupid. I get it, you want teams to have some drive to make better solutions. But it doesn't work out in a company like Optum where non-technical people are even so close to engineering that they're directly managing the engineers. Instead what you get are good products and teams getting ki-led off in favor of unproven moonshot projects that exist solely to extract money from the business with no vision for the future.

Well said, @ag+1kt753mf9.

I'm honestly curious what better company you think exists where you'd have job security and leadership that "loves" employees. Please, share with the class.

I actually think layoffs could be beneficial for this place. We have so many layers of management doing exactly nothing that nobody would miss. Instead of laying off the people who actually get things done, they should for once let go of the right people and everybody would benefit.

The past 5 years have been such a mess for this company. Clients, Staff, and investors have all suffered through what Kelly, Bill-n-Bo (at the time), and the boards though would be a huge payday for them. SunTrust and BB&T were culturally and mission entirely different. Both organizations lost so many good bankers who went on to the new rising stars in banking, Seacoast, Pinnacle, M&T, TD, 5/3rd, Huntington. Clients left too, when they lost their trusted banker (can't name those here). Those people and clients will never return. I hope the organization is now turning the corner for everyone's sake. But...be sure, more changes are coming for clients and staff.

In the last several layoffs, our team lost everybody above 50, and even two people in their late 40s. The rest of us are all here. I don't know if this is the case company-wide, but it certainly left a bad taste in my mouth. Really shows us there's no future for any of us here once we hit a certain age.

Careerminds conducted a new survey on layoff recovery. Organizations average 7.2 months to fully recover workplace culture. Trust in leadership and company future significantly declines after job cuts. These trust levels often remain below pre-layoff averages. Team-building and other strategies can accelerate recovery but are underused.

https://www.hcamag.com/nz/news/general/layoff-recovery-takes-far-longer-than-most-companies-may-realise/579680

I stopped working overtime, stressing about deadlines, and caring about making my boss happy. And guess what? Nothing bad happened and I'm actually doing fine. I'm doing better than I have in long time, in fact.

https://www.reddit.com/r/accenture/comments/1ua0hce/accentures_well_deserved_downfall/

Accenture's well deserved downfall
Accenture’s stock just dropped about 18% in a single day, wiping out a good chunk of many employees’ ESOPs, including mine. Honestly, having worked there for 3 years, I'm not surprised.

The biggest issue I saw was the culture and incentives. MDs and client leads were rewarded for selling deals, not for delivering them. Secure the deal, hit the sales target, collect the bonus, then hand the mess over to the delivery team and move on. It didn’t seem to matter whether the right skills, resources, or realistic timelines existed. The answer was usually “Deal with it.”

When a system rewards revenue at all costs, you end up promoting people who care more about money than people. Delivery quality suffers, teams burn out, and the best talent leaves.

What makes it worse is that Accenture spent billions buying back its own shares (around $4.6B in FY2025 alone) while many employees sat through years of weak bonuses, delayed promotions, and increasing pressure during the years of worsening inflation. During this time, some of the smartest people I worked with left for Big 4s, boutiques, and industry roles. And when they leave, they don’t just take their skills - they take relationships, credibility, and networks with them.

I just hope some level-headed people on the board or in senior leadership recognize these cracks and do something about them. The company still has plenty of great people and decades of experience. It would be such a shame if such a massive organization falls in the end.