#morale

Nothing more to do. Nothing more to accomplish. Nothing whatsoever.

Move along now ….

They wouldn't be forcing us to drive to an office while gas prices are out of control.
The cost of commuting is such an unnecessary burden when we were highly effective as fully remote employees for 5 years!
Love doing more work for less money!

I’d rather x than work at BNY another year.

I’ll start…
I’d rather insert my arm into a bear trap and gnaw it off with my own teeth than work at BNY another year.

Been here a long time and honestly getting pretty fed up.

I know I’m one of the stronger people on my team. I’ve consistently done the work, taken on more responsibility, and when I’ve asked what I need to do to get promoted, I actually did those things. I’ve also told my manager directly that I’m interested in the next-level role and see it as an important career opportunity.

Yet somehow people who have been here less than a year are getting promoted while I keep getting passed over.

At some point you have to wonder what the point is. If you do the work, meet expectations, take the feedback seriously and still get ignored, what exactly are you supposed to do?

My manager seems to have their favorites, and it’s becoming pretty obvious that hard work and performance aren't necessarily what gets rewarded. Maybe I’m just naive, but I thought doing a good job was supposed to matter.

I’m getting tired of feeling like I have to kiss up to management just to get basic career opportunities. And yes, at this point I’m seriously questioning whether I even want to keep putting in the extra effort.

For those who have been in the same situation at Truist, what did you do? Leave? Transfer to another team? Stop going above and beyond and just collect the paycheck? Retaliate and make your manager's life at work a living he.l.l?

Curious what others have experienced.

I absolutely love the fact that leadership is practically begging people to fill out the employee survey. Have any of them seen any of the feedback? A whole lot of really pi---d off people out there. Management will ignore the content which makes it baffling that they are pushing it so hard.

They have laid off so many people not one person wants to go the extra mile. Everyone is deflated, everyone says not my department. This company is honestly so fkd up. Why isn’t management stepping up? Protect the base ….. how about treat our customers with respect. Not one update from James Mc a total waste of space. Renewals are falling off a cliff and I’m being punished for it. Sort it out !

I'm doing three times the amount of work than I did when I first joined because we lost so many people, and I'm about ready to break. They keep adding things and don't give a damn whether I have the time to do it, not to mention energy. If I could, I'd leave today.

It's reasonably safe to assume that if you are on this site you are concerned about the possibility of losing your job in a layoff and judging by many of the comments you are also dissatisfied with working at NetApp. One thing I would offer is to send a message to the leaders of the company by NOT completing the employee survey. That sends the message that you are disenfranchised and don't care - which is a bigger concern than complaints around "barriers to execution" or the Thrive Together policy. BTW - has anything really ever changed as a result of these surveys?? F'em.

Instead of making everyone use kiosks for ordering because some employees were busted shoplifting, how about we pay people enough so they aren’t tempted to shoplift at work?

I know I need to leave this place, but I have no idea when I'll finally get the chance.

I've started thinking my below market salary might actually be protecting my job. That's a pretty depressing thing to feel grateful for.

EL has no vision and no plans so we just sit idling with a failing brand.

When we made toys every kid wanted to have? When layoffs were not something we had to think about all the time? Can we go back to those times? I miss them.

Why are we paying people to sit in meetings where nothing is ever decided and laying off good folks who actually do the work here? BP has plenty of fat that needs to be cut, but somehow it's never them who end up on the chopping block. When will that finally change?

I went from really liking my job to dreading it. And it happened in six years I've been here, which is not that long for such a drastic change.

Some people talk about sixty hour weeks as if they're proving how committed they are. I don't see it that way. If you're spending that much time working, you're giving up a huge part of your life for the job that will most likely reward you with even more work and nothing else. That's not a lifestyle I envy.

Everyone ready for smiles week?

Rough month to schedule it, but the calendar invite had already gone out.

For the uninitiated: SMILES Week is when a large company that sells both chips and soda sends everyone a calendar invite to be happy. It's also the month a chunk of our jobs moved to a shared services center in India or Mexico and everyone left behind got a second job's worth of work to "absorb." The timing is either an accident or the funniest thing HR has ever done.

The agenda, roughly:

Monday: Gratitude Circle. Share one thing you're grateful for. I'm grateful my role wasn't in this batch. Yet.

Tuesday: "Doing More With Less" fireside chat. Less is the headcount. More is you.

Wednesday: Wellness Wednesday. Twenty minutes of guided breathing to prepare you for the twelve hours of work that showed up when your teammate got "transitioned." Chair yoga, because standing up looks too much like a walkout.

Thursday: Career Development Day. Big news: the beverage rep and the snack rep are becoming one person. Two P&Ls, two scorecards, two bosses, one paycheck. That's not a merged role, that's a hostage situation with a route sheet.

Friday: Free lunch. One bag of chips, 40% air. Also the target fill rate for open positions.
Closing note from leadership: "Our people are our greatest asset." Assets get depreciated. Please see the attached schedule.

Weekend Edition
SMILES Week officially runs Monday through Friday, which is the schedule of the people who planned it. The people it's about work seven days.

Saturday: Customer Obsession Day. Corporate is at brunch. The field is in a big-box backroom looking for a pallet the system says arrived Thursday. Our in-stock score is tracked to the decimal point and worked by a merchandiser we pay $20 an hour, hired Tuesday, who can make $22 with no weekends at the warehouse across the highway. We told him he's the face of the company. He asked if the face of the company gets mileage.

Saturday, 6:40 a.m. He quit by text. His route is still green on the dashboard, because the dashboard finds things out on Monday, same as his manager.

Sunday: Rest & Recharge Day. The email says rest. The store manager's text at 7:15 says the cooler is empty. That same store manager fills out our customer service survey. "On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us?" He gave a 3. The rep who covered the route unpaid will be coached on that 3 during Monday's Gratitude Circle.

Weekend Bonus: #SmileSelfie Challenge. Post a photo of yourself smiling in an account. Winner gets a $25 gift card, the biggest raise anyone in the photo has seen since 2024. Pro tip: crop out the shelf.

Coverage note. We are a "One Team" culture. The team is currently one guy covering three routes, because the other two are open reqs HR paused for the transformation. He does not give a sh-t about the service score. It is the only rational position anyone in the company has taken all week.

The org is basically Game of Thrones now, except nobody wins the chair, the chair got outsourced, and the survivors get a lanyard that says SMILE.

Someone told me "smiles" is the longest word in English because there's a mile between the first S and the last one. It's also the distance between the all-hands deck and the org chart

Likely a pointless long-shot here, but it has to be said. It’s time for the senior leadership in this company to allow those who can to return to fully remote work. Between the enormous increase in health insurance premiums this year, a reemerging inflation crisis, skyrocketing transportation costs, etc.; the overwhelming majority of employees are unable to carry this financial burden. Compensation at this company simply isn’t high enough outside of the executive class to cover the cost of living explosion on 2026.

Allowing sales, admin, billing, contract, etc. staff (most of whom are still sub-6-figure incomes) to work fully remote removes some of the financial burden we’re all facing with $5-ish a gallon gas and all the inflationary side effects with $7-ish+ per gallon diesel (even worse on the west coast).

In addition, Canon is surely facing logistics increases as the diesel prices have skyrocketed and will continue to increase. Imagine saving money on utilities for office buildings for a while until the ongoing global conflicts find some kind of resolution.

Collaboration isn’t limited to face-to-face contact, and most of us still attend meetings via Chat even when we’re in the office. Something has got to give, here. People need a break. I just filled the gas tank on my aging SUV to prepare for the week before football today and it cost $100 (I guess I should have filled up on Wednesday and saved $0.40 a gallon…).

Do SOMETHING to help the people who actually do the work and make the company money. It’s costs the company nothing in the end, but can help improve morale and the financial health of the workforce in a historic time of financial stress outside of any of our control.

...just this...

Nah.
You're hiding now
$30 million disaster.

When Rome is burning

What's the mood like? Everyone is tense in my org.

I am not sure why these corporations are doing this to us. But jist wanted to say, in case someone out there needs to hear it, “hang in there!” I think it will be alright.

You know you work for a bottom feeder when:

1) SVPs of finance confidently says we always go down x%/year (instead of a one-time restructure like a normal company to align capital allocation with market opportunity)
2) SVPs of Print still think they 'run the company' despite secular market decline
3) An interim CEO for 9mo+ and no permanent in sight

Welcome to the new age. Dinosaurs are having increased bumps in pay checks and bonus eating the dinner of G4's and G5's. These dinosaurs are ruthless and shameless. While principal, directors and VP's are claiming the credit of the work done by G4's and G5's.

For a company full of people climbing over themselves to push AI ideas - I have a challenge for you. Ask AI what the actual impact of forced low ratings in a major company. Not to steal the thunder here but - it’s a total failure - across the board!

It brings -

Terrible supervisor behavior
Crushes morale
Encourages disposable practices
Invites lawsuits
Extreme cost from turnover
Moreover - these impacts are worse at a company like P66 because of the annual cycles of cuts, the layoffs, outsourcing, and automation.

What’s so bad about it? Consider this situation:

You are in a group of 60 people, no supervisor has more than 6 people, some have only 3. Because of the continuous cutting of the “worst” since 2012 and the outsourcing or automation of many entry level jobs - your group is comprised of seasoned professionals. You supervise 4 people, all improve their work processes, find opportunities and add value. Through the year you stretch your people and have challenging targets. Almost all are hit. And - this is a big one - you have no reason for substantive performance conversations through the year.

At year end, as you “calibrate” you are asked for your bottom performer. You choose the person who missed 1 of his stretch goals - knowing that this person had a great year, they just happened to be at the bottom of your group. You know they don’t deserve a “3”.

Through calibration, your group of 60 must have three people to hang “3”’s on. Last year, you had 2 people in the larger group who were very deserving of “3l ratings and one more that made sense - they all left the company. Now, as calibration moves on, you realize that your employee is in the running for bottom 5 of the group.

Let’s pause here - because this whole process is built on the idea that each supervisor is as good, as active, as honest as the next. Surely each supervisor is as diligent in giving stretch goals to their employees - right? Surely none of them have employees who do the minimum but don’t mess up - thereby flying under the radar?

Back to calibration. At the end of the session, all of your peers and your people leader agree that your person is the third “3”. Now, after a successful year, you get to tell them they underperformed and are going to have negative impacts to their compensation as well as be put on a performance improvement plan.

This, in various forms, is what forced ratings look like. In every instance you must assume that people who did not earn a 3 will get them. And when that message is given - what will the supervisor say?

An honest comment would be “I believe you did a great job, however, in calibration the group determined you to be in the bottom 5%.” And what would you tell him to work on, exactly?

HR will say you need to “own the rating” and you cannot say they don’t deserve it - but pull all that apart for a moment. Your true feelings, the ones you expressed at calibration, is that this employee does not deserve a 3.

This process cannot exist at a company that claims to care about employees.

Impact

The forced 3 should motivate this employee to look for a job. There is a high probability the supervisor may also be more open to leaving - having seen the true character of our policy. If they leave, how do you know we get someone better, and, when? Many studies show that turnover costs as much as 1 year compensation! Seems pretty short sighted.

Add to this that we don’t have good pipelines for development unless you are hiring from CapGemni!

Legal risk

Why is there legal risk? Because we are rating people low not because of their actions. In many cases, there will have been no negative feedback in the year from the supervisor. When this occurs, especially against a protected class - bad things happen. Use AI to see how many companies have been sued for this practice and how many have stopped because of litigation threat - it’s a lot.

This is a terrible idea - a horrible idea - and it impacts all but the highest level employees.

My hope is that a rigid core of supervisors will ask themselves honestly if each person who is hung with a 3 deserves it. If they do, they should have been given ample notice through meaningful conversations which are documented. If, however, you are a supervisor who is tasked with hanging a 3 on an employee you know does not deserve it - my hope is you say NO, and you inform management you would rather have it assigned to yourself as neither of you have earned it

Normally, you do not see this in the Call center environment because of the natural turnover people eventually quit but this week they fired a bunch of people, including a supervisor. We were once great company when we were DST. It’s now a sh-t business that doesn’t care about it’s people

It started with a letter from Elliott. Maybe it ends with a letter from the people still in the Tower.
From: The People Still in the Tower
Next stop: stability.

Removing two EMT members is not a cultural reset. What leadership does next determines whether this is actually one.

For years, employees have absorbed the consequences of strategy whiplash, expensive mistakes, consultant spending, restructurings, repeated cuts and leadership decisions they were directed to execute—even when the people closest to the work knew better.

The people making those decisions were compensated extraordinarily well. The people underneath them often paid the real price: jobs, careers, financial security, morale and trust.

That can’t simply be filed under “new leadership, moving forward.”

Leadership owns what leadership allowed.

The fiber chapter is over. The boardroom battles and proxy fights are behind us. The constant strategy pivots need to end. Crown Castle now has an opportunity to get back to basics: operate exceptionally well, generate sustainable organic growth, invest intelligently, execute consistently and rebuild the workforce that actually makes the company run.

And that means investing in people—not another round of cuts disguised as transformation.

Commit to a meaningful layoff freeze and give employees room to work without constantly wondering who’s next. Stop replacing institutional knowledge with consultants. Before launching another giant technology transformation, fix what is actually broken. Rebuild the expertise that repeated reductions stripped out. Invest heavily in cross-training and upskilling. Create career paths employees can actually see. Make mental wellness and psychological safety more than HR language.

And perhaps most importantly: stop treating people who identify problems as the problem.

Listen to them. Protect them. Thank them. Fix what they identified.

TA and KH are now part of the leadership team carrying this company forward. By many accounts, they are capable leaders. Now comes the harder part: demonstrate that the next chapter will be different. Acknowledge what employees have endured, establish clear expectations for how people will be treated, and rebuild trust through actions rather than another mission statement.

Crown Castle is an enormous enterprise supported by a remarkably small workforce. Its people should feel like an extraordinary asset—not an expense line perpetually waiting for another reduction.

Employees have survived the fiber bet, activist battles, reorganizations, leadership turnover, strategy reversals and repeated workforce reductions.

They’ve done their part.

Now it’s leadership’s turn.

Stability. Accountability. Respect. Career development. Operational discipline. Sustainable growth. No more whiplash.

And if the remaining EMT can’t commit to that, then on this casual ride we’ve apparently been taking for years, can someone please announce the new riders and the next stop?

—— And yes, AI helped mask the writers. We’re not d-mb, we’re survivalists. We’ve learned a few things around here.

Running like headless chickens.

It's Friday and this is the first full week that I am not working for a company that doesn't appreciate the value that at least one employee brought to a company's customer where we always kept the customer's well being top of mind. I was in the OCI org in North America, and I would be lieing to you if I told you that I had a great relationship with my manager who I would call today a true id--t -- he would be a great engineer but an incrediblly stupid manager and the irony is they kept him haha. Sorry for my ex-peers that are stuck with him.

Approx. 97,000 employees today

• 27% from high of 133,000 in 2023

That’s a feat to pull off.

Upside: Increased near-term profitability

Downside: Overburdened staff, undervalued staff, poor morale, retention risks, partial staff paralyzed by fear. Low-to-mid levels stripped of authority.
Not sustainable long term

Bell has seen attrition in head count from last layoff. Heard to boost morale they are giving 10% raises across the board.

They keep milking the cash cow. Training budgets slashed , only new employees are allowed to attend now. Oil changes at 7500 miles . Credit card $ charges limited. No safety meeting meals. When will it ever stop ?

Layoffs created uncertainty and chaos. Did not help the share price. Destroyed morale. Slowing down all projects, everything is crawling along. What is the point of layoffs? One incident will wipe out any savings from the layoffs and destroy the little credibility PayPal has

3 here. Seriously concerned.

Comrades, do just enough to get paid and nothing more. This place is a sinking ship and they’ll throw you to the sharks long before you are given a seat on a lifeboat. Spend more time with your family. Take long walks before the sun goes down. Medtronic will not take care of you. Only you can do that.

At what point does an employee reasonably say, “I have accepted increased workload and expectations for three consecutive years without a meaningful merit increase or bonus, while the company’s financial and stock performance have deteriorated, so the economic relationship between my contribution and my compensation no longer makes sense”?

If PepsiCo again provides neither merit increases nor bonuses for a third consecutive year, would resigning immediately be an irrational reaction, or could it reasonably be viewed as the culmination of a three-year pattern rather than a reaction to a single disappointing compensation cycle?

Will it ever be enough?

We can't go a single month without hearing about more people being shown the door. That's not a healthy working environment.