Thread regarding Fiserv Inc. layoffs

Any remotes holding on to even a sliver of hope that some “exemption” list exists just saw that hope walk out the door. If you weren’t let go at the end of April already, and you aren’t let go in May’s cuts or June’s, you will always have a large demerit hanging over your head and you’ll be shown the door eventually. Hey, maybe July is your lucky month!

I am moving in less than 2 weeks to a location not near an office and my manager told me I would be added to an exemption list for being able to work from home. He could be full of BS but all i do is sit in meetings all day and dink around with little automation tools here and there and it gets me constant praise. The key is to pretend to care about automation and agile and they will let you do whatever you want. Jokes on them because I use the time to refine my dev ops skills while my wife browses around for new jobs for me.

FB’s command and control Wall Street management philosophy is where the mandate comes from.

Where is this mandate for all remote workers to move into an office coming from?

Does epay cio cto ja drew still wear powder blue suede shoes and bedazzled jeans. He must be heaven with all of the firing going on. He’s very intimidated by people better than him, which is everyone

Listen to the earnings call to hear how proud Jeff and frank will be about these layoffs. They will tout their great leadership and ability to make tough decisions. Not all, but most of the leadership is morally bankrupt

@2oig+14KINTt4 Can't do that in a public forum, but I will try to answer any questions you have. I'm a small-fry with a few medium-fry friends. :-D

@ @2pwd+14KINTt4 - Man I would love to talk to whoever you are! I was RIF’d and am just at a loss. You seem to at least have SOME info. Would you be comfortable setting up a burner email address I could reach out to to make a confidential contact? If not I get it.

Knew this action was coming. Heard 30-45 days ago that managers were being tasked with identifying RIF candidates. In our BU, they let go both on premise and remote. Don’t think this is the end of cuts. Expect more cuts before end of the year

I knew about the shift away from work from home many months ago. I was let go and also a remote employee. However, I know several other remote employees in our BU and others who were unaffected by the developments on 4/30. Our team was non-billable, and that was the rationale provided to us why we were RIF'd.

My guess is the work from home is a mark against you, but not fatal - yet. We'll see what happens.

Our team supported production code and servers that is integral to our BU. By 5/15 we'll all be reassigned or gone completely. This is going to materially impact delivery of projects, thereby impacting the collection of revenue. None of the functionality we provided has been transferred to other teams or tools. It's just lights out. Oh well.

This RIF has been damn peculiar. I've lived through several RIF's at Fiserv. In Channels, they were driven by flagging products, and the usual model was every manager had to make a sacrifice and cut an FTE or maybe two. So the manager had a say.

This time, from what I gather, the managers were caught completely unawares one or two days out with a list of names. In addition, my team was tied to one of the most successful, fastest-growing products in the company. So the decision had nothing to do with lowering headcount to match a shrinking revenue pool.

In addition to my team's fate, in more than one case that I know of, no replacement process, tool or resource was set up to take over disappearing roles or responsibilities for other teams. Once certain operational areas start going up in flames (as in no revenue due to no people to do the work), they will have to scramble to somehow rebuild or transfer processes. Usually, that step happens BEFORE a RIF, not AFTER. tF?

Also, from what I understand, senior mgmt is under a very tight deadline to deliver that magic $900M in cost savings to the street. I'm not being cynical, if that's the goal for a business, then that's the goal. But I do wonder how revenue and operations in general will be impacted in the intermediate term by the mad rush to cut.

I was an remote employee in Alabama that couldn't make it to an office. The reason is thet closed our Bham office making me an remote employee. I was just let go after 22 years.

I have to laugh at those saying "this is not so...no mandate to work in offices." Of course there is and if you haven't heard it yet, you will. Look at the FD history. This is what they do. Rape and pillage. I was let go through a job elimination that was very convenient for them – long history, high rate of pay, remote. Jeff has NEVER cared about employees. It's all about meeting the dollars for the street. He doesn't want the first time the company has not met it's numbers to be on his watch. Good luck all.

@1uky+14KINTt4 The end of Work From Home was planned to be rolled out slowly. Your BU is either later in the original pipeline or the news hasn’t trickled down through your management chain. As with any rule there is bound to be exceptions. As a remote of almost the same tenure as you, I was told months ago to plan to move or train my replacement. Before our current world situation, that timeframe was said to be slow as well, and my job could be “safe” for upwards of two years. At this point I am not holding my breath.

I am a remote employee of almost 20 years. It has never been communicated to me that I must move. Having said that....I realize that with all that has been happening...I could be cut in the next round.

That is probably why many of the people that I know were given the boot yesterday (including me) —because we work from home. We also have years of experience and make more so away we go on the 15th.

@zhk+14KINTt4 I feel you, I respect what you said, but I still feel that Fiserv is looking at this COVID thing like a real perverted gift to speed up what they wanted to do anyway (milk the company to death, then hack the corpse and sell the pieces.) I think the only disappointment they'll have is that no vulture capitalist will touch it for a leveraged buyout now, and activist investors are too busy trying to save their own skins to pull a leveraged stock buyback to enrich the execs at the expense of saddling Fiserv with massive debts.

Hate to say it, but as soon as things get better enough I'm dumping stocks and pulling chocks on this joint (actually, I don't think it'd hurt to sniff around linkedin now...)

@zlc+14KINTt4 Agree. To the other poster who thinks this is all BS... Everyone needs to remember that the point of this site is to discuss things we have heard. Could be rumors, could be facts. More often than not, what you read on here is indeed factual - at least at the time it was posted. Things are fluid right now, especially with Covid19. No one anticipated this pandemic when planning for demand and resources. All they knew is they needed to save 900 Mil to deliver what they promised. Easiest way to cut expenses is to cut employees. They had a plan for that based on a BAU approach that considered incoming revenue. For the past 2 months we can all agree, it has not been business as usual. I am fairly certain sales are down right now. All we can do is hope and pray and wait.

They are facts. We were told Feb 7th if you were within 5o miles you were required to go back into a location. March 4th they came back and said they will choose the location based on where they want your department to be. I.e. Signature all in Lake Mary. There were only going to be 5 locations. Then a few weeks later said there will be around 10 locations.97

Oh f— this noise

Will drew have to dock his yacht at lake Lanier to be compliant

@xad+14KINTt4 Under Jeffs direction, temporarily requiring resources to return to offices in preparation for a layoff, may indeed have been the case however not with Frank. His position on WFH/Remote is not a secret. He doesn't believe you can do your job effectively if you arent onsite collaborating with your team. He has shared his philosophy with the leaders of Fiserv and Jeff has agreed with the cultural shift. If you have not been told to come into an office YET its because of challenges the organization is facing not because theyre planning to give you an exception to work from home. Perhaps they do not have the space in the office to accommodate ALL of the remote employees or they are still designing how the organization will be structured so that groups can be together in one location.
Smaller offices will eventually close and be consolidated into bigger offices. Pay close attention to locations that all of a sudden have no available positions posted on the Fiserv website. This is a red flag your office could be impacted. And also notice the only remote opportunities available are sales positions. Another sign.

This is not new news; they've been doing this since 2008 at least. They make this policy change every single time they're about to do a massive layoff, so that they can get all their equipment onsite from the poor sods they're about to kick to the curb. They make a lot of noise about work-life balance and about "sure you can work from home!" only to stab the WFH crowd right in the back (and first!) come layoff time.

Remote employees are being laid off, & to make it worse the same job is posted within a office site.

It IS fact this was slowly making its rounds before the pandemic hit. What’s amazing is the archaic out of touch approach as it compared to the rest of the industry even before the pandemic. Mind boggling.

This is not accurate. Epayments violates this across the board with almost all leadership not near an office. A number of staff continue to be remote as well. Most epayments leadership live near beaches barking orders and berating staff to work 7 days a week to pump up their millions in stock

It's obvious that Jeff doesn't care. He's the puppet and Frank is the puppeteer. It's insane that Frank kept his job through the merger, how much money is the company wasting on having 2 CEOs?? Fiserv was a good company until First Data took over. First data waltzes in and everything that made Fiserv great was just thrown out the door. Gotta make an extra $0.50 on the share price and if it takes firing half the company that's what they'll do.

Never mind the fact that it costs the company millions to have buildings and maintain them. They think the cost is worth it. No remote employees.

Perhaps this happened in your BU, however, this is not company wide. I can tell you from a management level of information, this is simply not a company wide mandate today.

I will not try to predict the future, but this communication has not been given across the board, nor have directives to bring people to an office or loose their jobs.

To those doubting this post, as a full time remote employee, we were told back in March before Covid, that all remote employees were required to move to a Fiserv location of the Companies choosing or we will be training our replacement. This plan was halted for obvious reasons. It was not even the closest location. It was the location the company wanted your role at.

Even if you are not a remote employee normally, this means that you will be severely limited in moving around within the company. If you want to work for a BU or product group that is located hundreds of miles away from your current home office. Tough luck. Pick up your family and move.

Frank has a strict no remote employees policy. He believes to be collaborative you must be onsite and preferably co-located with the rest of your team. How do we know? Because some of us were with First Data when Frank first became CEO. He’s following the same model for cutting expenses fast: (not necessarily in the order below).

1) force remote employees into offices. If they can’t be onsite let them go
2) cut resources with 2 consecutive years of performance ratings less than stellar compared to peers
3) cut resources at the top of their pay scale
4)consolidate and reorganize. Close small offices. Move those functions to a larger office.

This is truly where you realize you are just a number. Frank doesn’t care about you. Wall Street cares even less and Jeff is too busy strapping on his parachute to pay any attention to the destruction he agreed to. The awesome corporate culture Fiserv is known for is eroding day by day.

These are not facts. A company wide mandate was not out in place, nor have remote workers been laid off due to not being in proximity to an office.

This was due to a Fiserv wide mandate from Franky. Then COVID19 hit and we all work from home again. What's interesting is that dint care hiw far tou are from an office, you are expected to report to that office. Now it the let me go to the nearest office jts less than 20 miles. If the want us in alpharetta it's over 40 miles. Of course right now being employed is a blessing so I'll take what I can get

What facts are you basing this off of?

Any explanation as to why all staff has to be in an office now?