#morale

Lay me off or don’t, I don’t give a damn. I’ve been stressing so much and finally realized I’m destroying my health and for what? A company that’s happy to betray not just us but everything we used to stand for. I’m done with that. Yeah, losing my job wouldn’t be great without something lined up, but you know what? Others have been through it over the past few years, and every single one of them ended up doing perfectly fine after a while. So I just don’t give a damn anymore. I do my job, nothing more, nothing less, and that’s it.

Its unreal how a company who's ELT is so focused on a greater society just breeds hate.

Like wow, you ppl are horrible humans.

Sacking someone who made you a trillion, reshuffling entire top leadership only to make associates go through anxiety, uncertainty and depression all over again????

Pulse survey can’t come sooner, fido leadership is dead

It’s a wrap, execs are just talking nonsense now. Get ready for more nonsense in the coming months

Sometimes, the truth is stranger than fiction.

How, such a large group of inept middle and upper management can congregate in one place and conspire to hollow out the will to live of so many valuable employees across the globe, is a miracle to behold.

One bad decision follows another, and another and another. Cutting costs of everything to the point where services cannot be effectively provided to customers, while barking on about what a powerhouse they are and how it's all going to change with the reinvention. Which actually means outsourcing everything to the cheapest bidder and it now not working correctly.

Diversity and inclusion are pushed and sold to employees every day, yet all that is encountered is segregation, exclusion and discrimination unless you are in the club. Speak up for what's right and the ranks are closed and the fairy tales rehearsed with the useless, non-existing support network for employees, who are in management's back pocket.

CEO club is over, and so is your honeymoon.

This is so asinine and an obvious employee dissatisfier that could it be they are doing it to push people over the top so they leave themselves? A lot less to pay in severance. I just can't imagine anyone making that decision on something that shouldn't cost the company that much. It's got to be strategic decision.

The layoffs are a’comin! While they be right before Christmas this year? Will they admit their DEI initiatives have failed? Will they keep the unproductive drones?

I’m not sure whether it’s just Houston or all locations. Houston has a lot more to process than other locations so it could go either way at other locations. My recommendation is to start cleaning your laptop of any personal stuff, take personal things home now through the next few weeks, and then you’re prepared on Nov 10th regardless of what happens. Even if it happens in the office at your location, you probably don’t want to be walking down the hall with a box of your things for all to see. Where’s the dignity in that? For those that are told to WFH, the typical process is to mail you a pre-labeled box that you can use to ship your laptop and any other company property back to the company. There’s obviously no cost to you because the box is already labeled for prepaid shipping by the company. Everyone agrees that this whole thing is a difficult process, and for some a devastating one. Everyone I’ve spoken to is stressed out and very uncomfortable with what’s coming. Nonetheless, everyone will get through it one way or another. Life will go on and those who lose their jobs (unwillingly) will find new opportunities to begin the next chapter of their lives. Life does not end with one’s job. Remember that getting laid off in this round isn’t necessarily a reflection of your performance or value. This is such a large layoff that many good people that perform well will be dismissed. But, life will go on and those that are laid off will find the next opportunity in the next chapter of their lives.

Bumping this up for visibility. OP: @b4+1k6qj76jc

I doubt it.

I found out last week that the leasing contracts have all been sold off to various companies around the world. Europe was recently sold in the last months and North America was sold a while ago to a company called Peak. All the employees are gone from that group and Xerox doesn't have any equity anymore. We don't own anything anymore, we don't pay our bills even close to on time, if even at all (from what I have heard) and the employees are all disgruntled. On top of all of that, this company has a ton of C level execs for some reason and more high end managers than people that actually do work.
Great job Steve B! What leadership he's displayed running this company into the ground. Thank God the debt machine of Lexmark is here to save us! LOL I so look forward to Kim Kleps BS emails and the fireside chats of nonsense. Steve B getting an award weeks ago is the cherry on top of this sh*tpile.

We must reduce the corporate surplus population!!

What are the odds JW and DL were visited by the ghosts of Imperial Past, Present and Future this weekend?

I go to the office, do my work, and then go home and forget about it until 9am the next day. No one bothers me, pay and bonuses are decent. I don't allow myself to be drawn into drama. I am here for a paycheck, nothing more. A common theme on this forum is you've allowed your lives to become a soap opera. Let go of the drama. AT&T doesn't care what opinion you have about Policy. They ignore employees, so just ignore the distractions they create. Focus on the paycheck. Let it go.

Has anyone been able to find one intelligent person in Asset Servicing? They are really scraping the bottom of the barrel with that whole bunch.

It’s here just to push out as many people as possible on the cheap. If I’m wrong, convince me otherwise. Give me one example of RTO actually improving collaboration, efficiency, morale, productivity, anything, really. All I’ve gained is more time wasted commuting and higher expenses. I balance out the idiocy of RTO by making sure I’m not available after hours. None of it makes sense unless you see it for what it is - a way to make people quit.

Especially not this one. I’ve been doing the bare minimum for a while now. The only times I’ve actually put in extra effort were to help a teammate in a bind. At least when I get the boot, I won’t have any regrets.

Don’t even think about putting in for a promotion for your staff members because of the “economic climate”. WHY are Canon’s executive leaders not investing in our people??? We seem to have $$$$ to spend (see: SPHERE). Talented, hardworking people are resigning daily (or just “quiet quitting”…). Our TOP talent is leaving- fast & furious! Yes, there are some people leaving who have been dead weights anyway, and for them, good riddance - but not everyone. Either way, when your employees are the walking brand of your company, you NEED to make sure you treat them well, so they can spread positive word about the company. For example…Look at this layoff site. It’s supposed to be a site to talk about layoffs. And this page never existed for Canon until the major layoffs last year. BUT the conversations continue here to this day, even when the company is not actively laying people off - because of the way our people are being treated … so they come here to vent because no one else listens or does anything to address their concerns. Pretty simple really. The negative PR is not helping with sales.

Every town hall we hear the same message from the execs in that they go to all out global offices and meet ‘amazing’, ‘innovative’, ‘inspirational’, ‘hard working’ staff etc etc.
I can’t say that any of the execs I’ve seen on the town halls has given me the same impression or confidence, they might be hard working but who actually knows, so what oversight does the board have on their appointees and how good they are as it doesn’t seem to be much?

Reporter: Mr. Profitson, thank you for joining us. Let’s get right to it—your company has experienced multiple safety incidents in recent months, some resulting in serious injuries. Employees say morale is at an all-time low. How do you respond?

CEO Max Profitson: First off, let me say—we’re absolutely crushing it. Our shareholders are thrilled, and I just got a new yacht. So, clearly, things are going great.

Reporter: Respectfully, sir, that doesn’t address the safety concerns. There have been three major accidents in the last quarter alone.

CEO: Look, accidents happen. That’s just part of the exciting chaos of innovation. If anything, it shows our employees are really pushing the limits. I mean, who needs safety when you’ve got quarterly growth?

Reporter: But many of those employees were laid off. You outsourced entire departments to countries with little to no industry regulation. Isn’t that part of the problem?

CEO: I call it “strategic efficiency.” Why pay someone $100,000 when you can pay $3 and a sandwich? That’s just good business. Besides, the new teams are very enthusiastic. They may not know what they’re doing, but they’re cheap and that’s what matters.

Reporter: That sounds incredibly reckless. Don’t you feel any responsibility for the chaos and declining morale?

CEO: Morale is overrated. I find that fear is a much better motivator. If people are worried about losing their jobs, they work harder. Or they quit. Either way, I save money.

Reporter: You’ve taken a 300% salary increase this year while cutting thousands of jobs. How do you justify that?

CEO: Easy. I’m worth it. Have you seen our stock price? It’s up 0.3%! That’s practically a miracle in this economy. I’m basically a financial wizard.

Reporter: But your employees are protesting. Some are calling this the “Corporate Dark Ages.”

CEO: That’s just noise. If they spent less time complaining and more time working, we wouldn’t have these problems. I mean, I gave them pizza last quarter. What more do they want?

Reporter: Accountability? Safety? A living wage?

CEO: Look, I’m not here to make friends. I’m here to make shareholders rich. And myself. Mostly myself.

Reporter: I’m sorry, but how are you still employed?

CEO: Golden parachute, baby. Even if I get fired, I walk away with enough money to buy a small country. So really, I can’t lose.

Reporter: I think we’re done here.

CEO: Great! I’ve got a meeting with my yacht designer. We’re adding a helipad.

I have a ML who never physically works, shows up in the store for 1-2 hrs twice a month and is always complaining about how much work they have. But they are asking everyone else in the store to do the work for them on top of the tasks they are physically doing in store. Does that make sense? Wasting labor dollars for someone to do emails and come in just to show face?! When will corp realize we don’t need so many useless people

Be Kind to yourselves, layoffs are not a business decision, but a failure of executive leadership. You all are awesome, stay that way!

Absolutely nothing will change, except many of us will be jobless and replaced by cheaper offshore hires. At this point, I’m starting to think those who got kicked out first might be the luckiest. I can’t imagine enduring more months of this mess, only to land in a gutted team with heavier workloads and an even worse company culture.

Buried at the bottom of leadership moves happening with Wealth is the news that Mona Vernon is coming over to Wealth to "focus on customer and product offerings." This is happening in mid-December.

Will the replacement be internal or external? Will they be able to boost moral?

The constant sprinkling of RTO letters and little groups of layoffs paired with zero information is exhausting.

They should just do it and get it over with. All this game playing just motivates workers to stay out of fear of the job market or out of spite to get all the money they’re owed.

I was “fortunate “to land a position. Whole team has been impacted and I have no clarity on my role nor does my boss. No one can tell me when the move to Houston will be. It says if my planning and life doesn’t matter at all. I can find out that I will have to move in a month with no previous notice. I am supposed to give my all to this company which I do because I have a work ethic, but where is their work ethic?

It is any wonder why TD is struggling to sell when it likens to famous personalities. It lacks the creativity of TV designer Linda even when trying to dress up the truth. Lacks the elegance and humbleness of Sue on a tennis court. It's more likened to the selling skills of Albert Arkwright (Ronnie) in Open All Hours and determined to bag it's own drums like drummers Jay and Nicholas. Just barking up the wrong tree!

The whole problem with this company is the lack of visibility beyond line managers. I have no idea who my manager’s manager is, I’ve never met them, and I’ve never received a single message from them. Above that, there are another four layers of management who nobody ever hears from ever! And then we have the top brass who take all the profits and issue orders. No wonder the company is such a mess. By the time any direction filters down the message has changed completely, or just totally lost and forgotten.

At JPMC people talk behind others people back, gossip, gaslight, berate a novice for asking questions then huff and puff about being bothered if asked. I'm sure that it happens at Wells Fargo, Citi, MS, Goldman, TD, but I am in shocked at the scale that it happens here. I'm been here only 2 weeks. The only positive thing I have seen here is people talking back to people who are like that. The worse I've seen which is subjective to me is asking them what have they done in the last 10 years outside of work after loving to work 10 hour days. They can't name anything except drinking.

Since I'm new, how do I navigate this when keeping my head low is not working? They are coming up to me to see if I am part of the fraternity or like they say in the streets "size me up".

By Mattias Bergstrom, Former Forbes Councils Member.

As software technology leaders, we face the same challenges as leaders in other engineering industries, but there are differences.

One of our biggest challenges is employee churn. This is where software companies suffer more than others, especially when losing engineers—because it is not just a resource being lost but training, insight and morale that will take time to replace and can disrupt production. The cost of employee churn is higher than we think. Studies have shown that the average cost to replace a highly skilled employee is 213% of their annual salary.

PayScale found that in 2018, companies like Google and Amazon with above-normal salaries and desirable employee perks still suffered from a median employee tenure of just about 1 year.

We need to start looking to cause and effect analysis and stop looking at statistics. As Mark Twain is often credited with saying, “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

After trying to use statistics to work out what is going wrong, we have to accept that the statistics used are not helping. So, what is really going wrong? Well, when we look at software engineering versus other types of engineering, we quickly notice differences in management. In other engineering fields, most managers are engineers themselves. So, the processes and deliverables systems have been developed by engineers, for engineers, for a long time, even since the pyramids were built.

The need for software engineering became huge in the 1980s and '90s. The value of an engineer was too high to have them in management, so leads, project managers and department heads were recruited from the business sector to keep projects “on track.” As business-educated leaders typically have no education in engineering processes, they needed ways to “measure” and manage the engineers without a full understanding of what they do or how they do them.

So, all kinds of ridiculous KPI measurements were invented. The most famous in software engineering is probably the “lines of code,” in which the performance of an engineer is measured by the amount of code they write. Ways to game this include simply extending the comments in your code, having the team agree on a fixed amount of code or, as I have personally seen, checking in garbage lines of code at the end of the day and deleting them the next.

There are a bunch of examples of KPI systems still used today that all engineers know how to game—to mention a few: story point projections, change coupling, commit count and Google DORA. They can all be gamed and are so obviously developed by business-focused non-engineers who have no clue how engineering works. What is most funny is how these KPI systems all see the engineers as measurable menial workers, not as the highly educated, valuable assets that companies need to function and generate profits.

Around these business-developed and managed KPI measurement systems, development methodologies have been created, mostly to keep up with fictional business goals and for the engineers to keep up with the KPIs. Kanban, Scrum and Agile do nothing to optimize the engineering work happening; they only provide an arbitrary way for managers to feel in control.

Question for the folks that are in the factories. Are you guys leadership team dysfunctional or is it just ours. Seems the left hand don’t or won’t talk to the right hand. Nobody knows what’s going on. Always running out of things. Just curious if it’s isolated or wide spread.

Another pep talk from JR!🤢🤮

Everybody getting ready for the annual October layoffs? Not sure if it will be as big this year or not. Seems like they're gradually laying off people throughout the year versus a big October round, but maybe I'm wrong.

It's like sitting in a warzone, with stress all around you and knowing that a bo-b will drop on someone, hopefully it's not you. What a total moral ki-ler.

A survey of 1,500 US managers found that 25% of C-suite leaders admitted using return-to-office (RTO) mandates to prompt resignations, while 20% of HR professionals said their policies were intended to make staff leave. Nearly 40% of managers said layoffs still followed because not enough workers quit.

Amazon has faced some of the strongest backlash, with 30,000 employees signing a petition, 1,800 pledging walkouts, and many “rage applying” to new jobs.

Data showed 99% of companies with RTO mandates reported lower engagement, almost half saw higher-than-expected attrition, and 29% faced recruitment difficulties.

Leadership week is a joke. Norlin speaking to us about being a leader when he doesn’t do anything but monitor dashboards and fail at executing a go to market strategy is pure comedy. He needs to be the first one fired if this company has a chance.

Now that (hopefully) the emotions have started to settle after the layoffs at HCSC, maybe we can pivot the energy to something carthartic?

Let’s crowdsource ideas for harmless, policy-accurate compliance. The kind of thing you can do at any company that’s made it clear ethical or moral leadership is... no longer a priority.

We’re talking about doing exactly what’s required, nothing more, nothing less. No sabotage. No risking jobs. Just subtle disengagement that lets you sleep a little better at night, while giving the company exactly what they’ve earned, the bare minimum.

Basically - no team spirit :)

Examples to get us started (some were shared in an earlier post):

Employee surveys? 0’s across the board (except for the 1 question concerning direct manager - mine will always get a 5 - they're amazing). No other comments. No free consulting.

Stop “going the extra mile.” If it’s not in the job description or the SLA, it’s not happening.

“I followed the policy.” (Exactly. To. The. Letter.)

No more “I’ll just handle it real quick” after hours. We’re clocking in and out by the minute (unless it's an expected part of your jd).

Meeting runs past time? “Sorry, I have a hard stop.” Click.

The Rules:

No one here wants to lose their job. These ideas should be safe and policy-compliant.

This is FUN. A release valve.

No “Black on Monday” or anything traceable. Keep it anonymous and professional on the surface.

If you’re here to cape for the company with “But we should think about what’s best for the company,” this thread is not for you. Just scoff and scroll on by.

So... Harmless but satisfying disengagement?

35+ years in the industry, across several banks. I’ve seen it all. What’s happening now feels like the complete dismantling of banking as a business, a service, and an institution. Working in this industry has never been worse: more stressful, less rewarding, and utterly demoralizing. I doubt it’s any better at other banks. I’m close to retirement, so I no longer care much. But for younger folks, here’s my advice: don’t expect a career, don’t invest yourself too deeply, and don’t think hard work and skills will pay off. If you still have time, change lanes.

…

Silence

I have been having trouble sleeping and waking up at 3am every morning in with severe anxiety. Is anyone else struggling with this work order?

I’m not sure if it’s the imminent disruption to my daily life, having to find and pay for before/after school childcare and someone to let my elderly dogs outside daily, having to buy a 2nd car so my husband can also get to his office, spending a bunch of money (that nobody has) on a work wardrobe, having to sit at the office alone all day with no team or if it’s just the blatant disregard this company has for their employees. How can this be legal? How can shareholder support a company that operates like this?

I feel like with the pressure and struggles that everyone is feeling in today’s political and financial climate, companies like this are losing the respect and support of the people. The pressure cooker is on high and the lid is rumbling.

long time reader, first time poster

i simply must know ~~

how is life in ABU IT after the layoffs? it was pretty bad before the event. what is it like now? did they keep some good leaders and people?

It's so sad to see people working so hard, doing the work of 2+ people every day, and seeing the light drain from their eyes and faces. Everyone seems to have the same "ugh" dejected and defeated look. Pure exhaustion!