#morale

For those who don't currently work at Ford, you may think the posts about having a chair taken, restrooms in disrepair, parking lots on overflow, and people camped out in cafeterias that were not made for working are all an overstatement. As a current employee I'm here to tell you they are absolutely true and being reported by our coworkers on an increasingly frequent basis. I have personally witnessed each of those things in my building in Dearborn.

Current employees, I encourage you to join the viva engage channels where folks are sharing their experiences from around the world. You can share your experience, you are not alone.

In Mexico, they are commuting 1-2 hours each way due to the traffic congestion around the location where the Ford campus is located. In Dunton, a 20 mile drive can take 1-2 hours with traffic.

These are not employees looking to complain for the sake of complaining. These are employees who have done what was asked and showed up to their assigned location, only to be continually failed by leadership and Ford Land.

Someone posted about occupancy limits and fire code violations. They are cramming so many people into spaces that were not meant for people to be sitting at. Cords are draped across tables and the floor since there are no power outlets on tables that were meant to eat lunch at.

It doesn't have to be this way and it shouldn't be this way. Please speak up. Use the onsite feedback site that I'm sure has been shared in your channels. This is not healthy, it is not productive, and for those of us who truly want to see the company succeed, it is accomplishing nothing but tearing us apart.

The wider we share our experiences, the more chances we have to put some real social pressure on those who made these decisions.

To all of those showing up, hang in there and know you're not alone. And also, I'm sorry, we used to be so much better than this.

My manager has a team meeting scheduled tomorrow for all of us.

It's going to be like that scene in Animal House with Kevin Bacon.

Utter chaos and our manager will be screaming "stay calm all is well!" F it I'm taking Monday off.

EH is a charismatic leader who is adored by the Nike Staff. After all he had pretty bad boots to fill. Post this re org we need to see Nike rebound otherwise it’s just a constant annual thing which will make people just exhausted from their battle scars and leave on their own accord. Best of luck Nike

I just saw that Leah is leaving AMN after nearly 10 years. That’s a huge loss of knowledge and leadership.

Honestly, it makes me wonder what’s going on behind the scenes. Is anyone else feeling uneasy or thinking about leaving? Are there things happening at AMN that we should be aware of?

Not trying to stir the pot, just looking for honest perspectives from others here. She was the best thing that happened to AMN.

We have become a case study for students!

ExxonMobil is one of the largest publicly traded international oil and gas companies in the world. So why is this successful 140-year-old company dealing with an allegedly toxic organizational culture?

What is organizational culture?
Organizational culture is a firm’s shared values, beliefs, traditions, principles, rules, and role models for behavior. Also called corporate culture, an organizational culture exists in every organization, regardless of size, organizational type, product, or profit objective.

COVID-19 exposes cultural problems
According to a Bloomberg article, the pandemic was a difficult time for Exxon employees thanks, in part, to low crude oil prices. Salary increases were halted, benefits were reduced, and the company faced layoffs.

Morale was low, so after about a year and a half, Bill Keillor, global IT vice president, wanted to help. His leadership teamed arranged an awards ceremony and promoted it on the company’s internal social network Yammer. According to anonymous reports, the award ceremony, which was largely virtual, turned into a tense town hall with attendees voicing concerns and asking tough questions. Exxon is known for having an authoritarian, top-down culture, so this did not sit well. Allegedly, Keillor snapped at attendees and brushed off their questions.

Turnover
After the event, employee-created memes circulated private chats, slowly making their way across the company. Some joked about quitting, but for others, it wasn’t a joke. The company’s turnover rate is the highest since 1999 when Exxon merged with Mobil. In the last two years, 12,000 employees have departed, less than half of which were from layoffs.

According to an Exxon statement, every company has experienced attrition in recent years due to the Great Resignation, and the oil and gas company does not consider this to be a long-term trend. Revelio Labs, an intelligence company that uses public employment records, says Exxon’s turnover rate is in line with the nationwide average but higher than competitors, including BP, Chevron, and Shell. Exxon disagrees with this analysis.

Inside Exxon’s culture
Bloomberg Businessweek’s investigation suggests there may be a deeper problem at Exxon. The publication interviewed more than 40 employees (current and former) and reviewed dozens of Exxon’s internal documents, and found evidence that Exxon has an insular, fear-based culture that is out of touch with the outside world.

Exxon uses a performance ranking system. Previously, employees were ordered from 1-to-100 on a bell curve, but the system was reworked in 2020 to make the processes more transparent and helpful to employees. Instead, employees are placed in performance categories. Anyone in the lowest category can choose between a performance improvement plan or severances. According to Reuters, about 5 to 10 percent of the company’s workforce is assigned performance improvement plans. Employees in the lowest-performing tier can save their job by improving their performance, but a significant portion of them will leave.

A senior corporate advisor says the system should not be feared or a source of anxiety because it helps employees succeed and keeps their performance in line with organizational objectives. On the other hand, some individuals say the ranking system makes employees hesitant to share bad news or unpopular opinions.

According to an analysis by CultureX, an MIT organization that uses artificial intelligence to evaluate organizational culture using Glassdoor reviews, Exxon faces toxicity challenges and ranks below 143 out of the 196 industry benchmarks CultureX measures. The most frequently discussed cultural values, according to more than 1,400 Glassdoor reviews, are agility, performance, and execution.

Exxon on the defense
An Exxon spokesperson responded to these criticisms, saying they were unfounded. The spokesperson pointed to the number of new employees hired every year and how long people tend to stay with the organization. She suggested Bloomberg’s investigation made broad observations with few data points.

Despite these questions about ExxonMobil’s organizational culture, the company is performing well financially with its stock nearing a record high. If there is indeed an organizational culture problem, Exxon will have to address it to attract and retain the best talent.

In the Classroom
This article can be used to discuss organizational culture (Chapter 7: Organization, Teamwork, and Communication), morale (Chapter 9: Motivating the Workforce), and turnover (Chapter 10: Managing Human Resources).

Discussion Questions

Define organizational culture, morale, and turnover.

What evidence is there to suggest ExxonMobil has a negative organizational culture?

If ExxonMobil has a top-down, authoritarian culture, why do you think employees spoke up during the award ceremony about their concerns? Why do you think more than 40 employees agreed to speak with Bloomberg?

This article was developed with the support of Kelsey Reddick for and under the direction of O.C. Ferrell, Linda Ferrell, and Geoff Hirt.

References:
"ExxonMobil," Sloan Review, https://sloanreview.mit.edu/culture500/company/c289/ExxonMobil

Jennifer Hiller and Shariq Khan, "Angst at Exxon as Managers Begin Employee Performance Reviews," Reuters, June 21, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/business/exxon-cut-us-workforce-by-up-10-annually-bloomberg-news-2021-06-21/

Kevin Crowley, "Exxon’s Exodus: Employees Have Finally Had Enough of Its Toxic Culture," Bloomberg, October 13, 2022, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-10-13/exxon-xom-jobs-exodus-brings-scrutiny-to-corporate-culture

https://www.mheducation.com/highered/blog/2024/06/does-exxon-have-a-culture-problem-march-2023.html

We never see the guy in the parking garages - not in Ross, not in DalPark. We never see the guy roaming the headquarters either. The guy lives in Bluffview, TX - one of the wealthiest neighborhoods of all of Dallas. He gets driven 15 min to the HQ in his Range Rover and parks in private parking. Then proceeds to take his private elevator that lights up straight to floor 4.

Yet, I have to commute from McKinney - a middle class city to downtown and sit in bumper to bumper traffic. I am waitlisted from DalPark so pay 50 bucks per month to park in Ross. But that requires taking a crumby shuttle past the homeless to global HQ. So, I decide to pay double for parking and pay the daily parking fee at Ervay St and then walk over 5 min to headquarters. I pass several suspicious, crazy, and homeless people and realize I don’t have any pepper spray on me. Once I get in HQ, I see impressive led screens then take the elevator to floor 8 where the monitors, keyboards, and mouse haven’t been refreshed since 2010. Just 2 floors above Stankey where the floor was recently redone.

1 company. 2 different people. 2 very different lives. Rules for thee but not me.

John Stanley has we-ponized the 5-day RTO and turned AT&T into a corporate Hunger Games.
🚗 Long commute = the opening obstacle course.
🪑 No desk = fight for survival.
🅿️ No parking = bonus round.
🏢 Sh---y buildings = final boss.
🏴‍☠️ Low morale = the prize.

Stankey wants a market based culture, but it’s a 2 way street and we need to give them the same. Just so the bare minimum to get paid and save any effort and energy you have for when you move on to your next company.

When companies talk about “transformation,” it usually sounds like innovation, growth, and opportunity. At Verizon, though, transformation has quietly turned into something else — a reshuffling of its workforce.

Over the past decade, Verizon’s headcount has dropped from about 135,000 employees in 2016 to just over 100,000 today. The cuts have come through layoffs, buyouts, and big outsourcing deals, like handing off IT operations to IBM or tech support to Infosys.

The people leaving aren’t random. It’s mostly long-tenured employees — the ones with higher salaries, pensions, and strong benefits. When they walk out, so does decades of knowledge and experience that helped keep the company running.

At the same time, Verizon is still hiring. New roles are opening in software, data science, and AI. Public filings show some of these jobs paying between $140,000 and $220,000. Younger engineers are coming in closer to $100,000 to $130,000. That’s good money, but it’s still far less than what many veterans were earning before being bought out.

The result is clear: Verizon isn’t just cutting jobs, it’s swapping its workforce. Higher-paid veterans are leaving, while newer, cheaper, or visa-sponsored hires step in. To Wall Street, this is packaged as “AI transformation” and “efficiency.” Inside the company, it looks a lot more like cost-cutting.

So is Verizon right to do this? On paper, the math makes sense. Lower costs protect the dividend, and pointing to new AI hires pleases investors. But on the human side, the risk is real. You can’t replace years of experience overnight. And if service quality slips or morale keeps falling, those costs will show up later.

The employee Morales must be very low giving the business and stock pormances.

There’s absolutely nothing. I don’t know if it’s just bad luck or if the market is really this broken. If anyone has even the smallest positive story, please share. I need to hear that someone out there actually managed to land a decent job, or at least got an offer. I haven’t had a single callback. It’s infuriating and demoralizing. And now with layoffs hanging over us, I don’t even know how we’re supposed to keep it together.

Oracle showed us how little it thinks about us. That no amount of knowledge, experience, or initiative will protect any of us from layoffs. So why in the world should any of us bother to do anything else but the bare minimum? I'm done. I'm quiet quitting until I find something new.

Don’t worry there’s about to be plenty of “open chairs” what a DB

If we want to continue having our voices seen and heard we need to keep speaking up together. This is the place to do it in unison.

What the he-l are the survivors supposed to do? Quadruple their workload?

I think the government is more modern than Dell. The initiatives they drive to modernize are basic engineering practices that our management rejects, because our management teams at the SVP level and up have no idea about technologies or industry practices. The operational models they’ve put into place in ISG and CSG are steps backwards. They couldn’t possibly be more bureaucratic and foolish. Just huge power grabs made from people who have no idea what they’re doing and are so philosophical and unrealistic it’s embarrassing in practice.

Meanwhile you add the layoffs, cut throat attitude and poor strategy and you’ve got yourself one of the worst businesses of all time.

Dell is a company stuck in the 90s that has no strategy, poor management and terrible engineering practices. They don’t really want to modernize although they like the word.

It’s pathetic and sad.

I was part of the layoff but I feel the cut was not needed in my department and it was a way for my manager to look good since we had some retirement coming up and the person did not get touched but I did and another member did. A senior member indicated that won’t get impacted.

Anyway I’m out it su-ks I worked so hard and cared. I looses sleep over this .

Really feeling down about not getting any offers for months now since Dell laid me off, severance and unemployment running low. I’d love to hear some success stories from anyone laid off this year that got new roles they’re happy with.

Yes as a member and an employee we see you. Thank you. Just a handful of these executives that are not worth the millions in salaries they are paid that toss and turn information and adding no value can go versus 100 to 200 of us who barely scratch the surface to hit that dollar amount. Don’t lay us off we do all the work day in and day out. Scratching our heads at these leaders who make our lives he-l and don’t care about the members. Keep it at the top and we will do the work all day!

🤣

and you can do much better. Go work at a company that actually values their employees.

Phillips 66 offers good pay and good benefits. And before the Go Go regime took over it was a relatively satisfying place to work.
Now with the failure of BT. WEP, and never ending layoffs it’s sad place to work.
Morale is at rock bottom. Employee engagement is practically nonexistent. Most employees that I know of are just going through the motions of doing their jobs until they find other employment.
I spend time almost every day talking to recruiters and spiffing up my LinkedIn profile on the company dime.

Their social media feeds are filled with showing off Nike WHQ and the experience. Their biggest achievement in their life is Nike, their identify is nike. Isn’t it sad.

Right-sizing is not about cutting back. It’s not about loss. It’s about clarity, focus, and positioning ourselves for the future. Think of it as shaping a high-performance team where every role, every resource, every process is aligned with where we want to go.

We are at a point in our journey where the opportunities ahead are huge, but so are the challenges. The market is evolving, customer expectations are shifting, and innovation is relentless. To rise to this, we cannot afford to be carrying structures, systems, or habits that hold us back. Right-sizing is how we unlock agility, speed, and strength.

This is about creating an organisation that is fit for tomorrow, not just comfortable with yesterday. It’s about ensuring that every person here is in the right place, with the right tools, doing the right work that adds the most value. When we do this, we don’t just survive change—we drive it.

And here’s the inspiring part: right-sizing is not about reducing what we are; it’s about amplifying who we can be. It’s about freeing up energy, capital, and creativity to invest in growth, innovation, and the things that really matter to our customers and our future.

Together, we will become leaner, sharper, and more resilient. Together, we will build an organisation that is not only successful but significant.

So let us embrace right-sizing as a catalyst—not for less, but for more. More clarity. More opportunity. More impact. More future.

Because this is not the end of something—it is the beginning of our next level. And we are going there together.

Thank you.

I know today and the next few days have and will be hard. The way this company is behaving is irrational; the colleague experience is not at the forefront of their minds nor the client experience that is preached about. Although they are preaching it is not cost savings it obviously is, they are chasing a number. This will not improve the stock price nor the client satisfaction levels. The actions taken today will have a huge impact of confidence levels from the board and analysts.

Today I have seen people in shock, hurt, and worried about their future. Whatever emotion you are feeling know it’s not a reflection of your talent or value. This thread is to offer support to those impacted.

With the never ending WFR,low moral,ever increasing sales quota,low pay by industry standard,full return to office,ever increasing KPI's,0 career progression,0 industry standard training,ever changing end goals and zero motivation from all involved.Has Dell completley lost any ability to attract or keep real talent going forward?
Seems to me like they have focused on the short term for far too long and this will be the downfall of the company.

I’m sure these three basically-kids and two chronic slackers are ready to fill the shoes of the four veterans we just lost. I also hope they’re ready to take on the workload, because I sure as he-l am not going to. Is there even a general idea of how many teams like mine are supposed to function, let alone produce good work?

God knows how this will impact us down the line. As a rule, we get the short end of the stick. The appetite for change at the top can quickly turn into an appetite for more money at the top, which often means another round of cuts for the rest of us. Never forget that the preferred state of affairs would be for us to work for free. Short of that, it’s doing the work of three people while living under the constant threat of being cut. That seems to be the current model.

It seems my manager is intentionally shutting my contribution down, even after evidently doing more work than rest of the team.

I have received zero appreciation from my my manager, instead keep receiving same comments for Quarterly.

Is this normal?

Feeling so disheartened and disappointed.

This firm truly prefers teacher's pets and individuals who are less deserving when giving recognition, appraisal, raise or bonus.

I have slogged my a$$ and all of my manager downplays everything I did, undermining my contribution.

I’ve had it with this place and I’m pushing hard to find something else. Even with a rough job market, I can’t stay here any longer. Constant layoffs are draining and I really need a job where I can focus on my work, even if it's for less pay. Thanks, Cisco, for bringing me to the point I never thought I'd be in.

Dell mgmt is lost. The leaders they have in place are the worst they have ever been. The BS charade of AI is finally being shown for what it is, which is nothing. The modern dev initiatives are falling apart. The stock is on a nose dive even though they had “record revenue”.

The employees are not happy, there is clearly a lack of strategy and the company is being driven into the ground.

MD only intention at this point is to su-k the company dry and sell pieces of it off.

when will these never ending layoffs and re-orgs just stop. It feels extremely unnerving and unsafe, even as a high performer, to feel like you could be on the chopping block constantly over the past few years at Nike.

What a kick in the knackers for the hundreds of people over the last 2 years that ANI let go.

Social media today full of pics of their big event.
Hiring a conference center, catering, games, Virtual Reality stations, music not to mention the costs of the NUMEROUS celeb guests (Brian Cox, Kelly Holmes, Shane Todd and more).

Never saw a party spend like this in 20 years of good times. How dare they do this while constantly laying people off.

I’m sure it was fun for those of you who still have jobs. But for anyone affected by global mismanagement and worried about mortgage payments this was sickening to see.

Don't forget to go to Glassdoor or other sites that potential talent might use to peek behind the curtain before interviewing and light them up. Be sure people know what a toxic place they've become.

A social event scheduled for 3rd Sept over in the London Walbrook office has just been cancelled. Could be ominous.

Discuss......

If I hear one more “rumor“ on this website of layoffs, I’m going to vomit. I swear to God every month somebody puts up a rumor on here and it never happens. All it does is cause concern for the employees who have been there and are still working. Do you all get off on using scare tactics to freak everyone out? I think you will need therapy.

Imagine being told your job as a director is being eliminated before the holiday weekend.

When it comes to layoffs there is no finish line. Just Do It? Apparently that only applies to cutting headcount. Always chasing the shiny objects while the basics get benched. Somehow MD still has a job, and HR is running around like it’s a team-building offsite. Help us.