#workload

did ur project stop? Did deadlines slip... roles move sites, responsibilities consolidate, or did ur team absorb the reduction w/out (major) disruption? I think it's a sh-tshow but it may be just me - we are fairly large and given the messages on this board it looks like there is quite a bit of variety.

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

They always act like they're doing something, they always have to talk about something to the manager to make it seem they're so busy, but at the end of it all, they end up doing nothing! It's the rest of us that do the actual work. they just appear busy. How do you even deal with people like this when they have your manager's ear?

What do relationships managers really do?? Because at this point I belive their job is to just redirect their responsibilities or even misdirect. Do your job and stop making others do the work of three depertments!!! Its infuriating!!

The next person with most experience has been here for a little over a year. Needless to say, I spend most of my time explaining how things work instead of doing my actual job. I'm this close to just quitting and lettings them figure it all out by themselves. I wonder how that's going to work out for the management who got rid of everybody with any experience.

We lost two people who were integral to our team. Their work has to be done. The rest of us are already overworked, so if they expect us to be the ones to do it, they're in for a rude awakening. I don't think somebody really thought things through when making the latest layoff list.

Finance employee. It is breaking us. Leadership knows and doesn’t care. Time to jump ship? Anyone else feel the same?

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

Walgreens keeps cutting. who is actually doing the work now? When someone leaves your team, do they give you headcount for replacement just divide the work among everyone who is left? The later seems to be the case most of the time but I guess things are different within each group or in the store.

It has been two weeks since many members of my team have been involuntarily / voluntarily separated. I've picked up so much work and responsibilities. Any suggestions for what I should do? I'm feeling completely burnt out. I'm looking at other organizations to apply to because I just don't feel appreciated, or even that our superiors are aware of the impact these changes have on me and our team.

It seems as if the whole unplanned Mission Simplify (referencing Town Hall presentation) did not plan for the fact that these people are being let go right before AEP, leaving no one else to fill in for them but the people still left behind during the busiest season for the company.

At least if my people leader presented me with a plan - I would feel a bit better. But there is no discussion of increase in team resources or pay.

I'm not quite sure how much longer I can go on like this.

While comparable US employees reporting elsewhere are not, these are the violations:

National-origin discrimination — Title VII, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2
If the different scheduling is because of national origin.

Adverse working conditions for U.S. workers — INA § 212(n), 8 U.S.C. § 1182(n)
Particularly relevant if other employees doing comparable work receive better hours or working conditions.

Overtime violations — FLSA, 29 U.S.C. § 207
If the overnight schedule results in more than 40 hours per week without required overtime pay.

i am in sales, but askng for all areas: anyone seeing ai actually reduce work?

i hear about it all the time, social media + media - doom and gloom - fu--ing end of the world all around...

but i'm not seeing much of this happening around me?

prospecting? quotes? crm updates? forecasts? i see things improve but no direct impact.

has ai actually reduced headcount?

has it stopped backfils? or eliminated real work?

curious what people are seeing at dell.

Here in Poland, at the Łódź manufacturing facility, the workload has been quite low lately—I would even say there is practically no work, especially on progressive lines and Line L1, where the vast majority of components are routed upstream to departments L3 and L4 (server production).
On Wednesday, a massive wave of layoffs hit two shifts, letting go of a significant number of agency workers. As a result, the total headcount was cut almost in half. To retain valuable personnel or certain individuals of interest, management is reassigning them to other departments where work is still available.
My question is: Is the situation the same at other Dell sites, or is it different elsewhere?

Running like headless chickens.

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

Perhaps the same problem at CVS too!
"slop grenades" everywhere!

https://www.businessinsider.com/shopify-ceo-ai-slop-grenades-can-make-work-harder-2026-9

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?

grow careers! (from stressed out e execs who Only want to hear that you’re going to work extra hours to get them off one of the thousands of naughty lists that fiserv uses instead of management)
keep the list going:)

Is it normal to be expected to do 50-60 hour weeks?

We lost half the team months ago and somehow the amount of work didn't change. The people left behind are just expected to cover everything now.

Be careful about constantly taking on responsibilities that aren't part of your job. Once everyone gets used to you doing them, they will stop seeing them as extra and you'll be sc--wed. I'm talking from experience.

Got called on it and told to do 8 hours

So the people that said you can just do 6 hours or 7 hours. That was all BS

Hope they will give extra time pay and salary hikes and bonuses, didn't even hear about foculs from the last year appraisals

Although many layoffs occurred, there are still a lot of b-ms around. 1. The guy walking in circles and around the office all day (VP) making over 200k probably close to 300k along with the rest of his crisis management people. What do they do? I think we need to also look into lower salary people that don’t do anything as well. Or if we aren’t going to get rid of the non- workers, atleast increase compensation for those that are completely swamped with work.. important valuable work.

You'd rather lay people off instead of putting them in the much needed CS Phone position. You'd rather pull other teams to work phones while their primary work gets behind. You'd rather pay out time and a half for overtime (more money out) instead of hiring a phone team. You'd rather keep GR and LG as supervisors who run people away and doesn't know the first thing about integrity or professionalism, or is that it? Is it easier to make things so unbearable that employees quit instead of looking like the bad guy and laying off. Interesting!

I’m in sales at OT everyone is heads down in PTEP SFDC spending all day filing out stupid fields. It’s so cumbersome….. Q1 is a mess anyone agree ?

Five meetings in one day and I still have actual work that needs to get done. And once they start, everyone looks bored, including the people who scheduled them. We've lost the plot, folks.

I say this after every layoff round, and I'll keep saying. Don't pick up any of the work done by your former coworkers. Say you're busy, already overloaded, it's not in your job description, or say anything else you can think of, but don't do it. They're counting on you picking up the slack, despite so many of us already being criminally overworked. Don't do them that favor. Let them face consequences of their own actions for once.

But now the workload has became ridiculous and I no longer feel like anyone is listening when I raise concerns about it. The culture has also deteriorated drastically, to the point where it's unrecognizable. Such a shame how much this place changed.

I used to be somewhat impressed with Tech Support as I could get an American-based tech relatively quickly, but it has gradually devolved into a sh!t show where NOTHING gets resolved.
I don’t have to tell you why.

It’s unbelievably frustrating to be on the phone with someone who you know doesn’t understand what you’re telling them and who keeps reverting back to a useless script.

I can’t be the only one experiencing this.

Now that WF is moving to bi-monthly pay periods starting 2027, how would layoff schedule will change?

Why does every empty position sit around for four to six months before anyone fills it? Why do the rest of us on the team have to pick up the slack during that time?

for those who have worked at Oracle and other large tech or enterprise software companies, how does Oracle compare?

I'm interested in feedback by foks who have worked at companies like microsoft, SAP, salesforce, IBM, Cisco, etc. How would you compare the culture & comp, workload, mgmt, job security and opportunities for promo/growth?

As someone moving from medium sized tech company I find Oracle less stable and more intense... also a bit more bureaucratic with slower promo... comp and career growth are equivalent...

Is AI at the bank actually beneficial to anyone. So far, all it does for me is make things slower than normal (looking at you, EVA). The tools we have seem so disjointed, and I’m told to start using them, but also that I have to verify the accuracy of the AI outputs, which just takes longer than actually doing the work myself. Even for simple tasks, it typically takes longer for me to get the AI to write an email for me than it does to just write an email myself. When I complained about layoffs on my team, I was told that it should be fine because we have AI now, but the AI can’t actually take on the projects my former colleagues did, and it definitely can’t work across the various systems we have to use.

Is it actually helpful in some areas? Or are we just having this garbage shoved down our throats because it’s the latest trend to force it on everyone.

If not, is it smart to reach out to HR about it?

That's what it feels like lately. Just pile on more and more work =until we break and walk out.

At this point, I don't think retaining the good people is even on the priority list. Someone leaves and instead of replacing them, their work just gets dumped on whoever is still here. Then the deadlines get shorter and the pressure gets turned up another notch. There's always that unspoken feeling of "do it or else," and I'm getting really tired of it. Maybe getting laid off wouldn't be so bad.

It feels like there are more people managing meetings and reports than actually getting things done. Newer employees are especially sc--wed because they don't have many real leaders left to learn from.

It's pretty obvious that a small group of people here are carrying most of the workload. Those of us who're experienced and know how everything works, but we're also completely exhausted. A lot of us stay because the job market is the way it is, but that won't last forever, and then GP better be ready for an exodus.

They can't keep new hires. Employees are retiring and quitting. Everyone hates it. Not enough employees to do the work. Everyone is tied to their desk with constant threats on idle time. Constant changes being implemented making it impossible to keep up. Your expected to take all your calls and still get your work done which is impossible with the amount of calls coming in. The micromanaging is tremendous. Its complete missery. Instead of firing those that need it, they make their good employees miserable. The good employees are constantly having to do others work. The burnout is real. I'm planning to Ieave as soon as I can.