Thread regarding American Electric Power Co. Inc. layoffs

Not on my worst day, pal.

Based on others comments, Therace has turned IT into the next Chernobyl and we all know how that worked out. Personally, I cannot think of one redeeming quality of Therace or any of the managers she brought in. She and her cronies created this mess, I hope they choke on it. Therace, if you read this, you are a horrible person, plain and simple.

I think we can all agree, it’s a management issue- either therace or most other managers that have ran this company into the ground.

American Electric Power Co. Inc. is getting worse by the day. Therace Risch and her gang of corporate bullies – Joe Brenner, Steven Martin, and the whole Minneapolis Mafia crew – are under fire for treating the company like their personal playground. And let's not forget about the disgraced former VP, Sanjay Theranakambi, and his band of rejects from TCS, kicking out loyal employees like they're yesterday's trash.The big shots at AEP, led by Therace Risch, are getting blasted for turning the place into a swamp of favoritism and corruption that even Satan would cringe at. And seriously, how blind is the Board not to see that the IT department is basically Therace's puppet show, mostly operating out of Minneapolis like it's their own little kingdom?

Now, let's talk about the bloodbath they call layoffs – it's like they're playing a twisted game of chance with people's livelihoods. They're axing the lifers, the ones who've given their all to this company for years. And what do they offer in return? A laughable severance package, like they're throwing scraps to starving dogs. Meanwhile, morale is circling the drain, and the higher-ups couldn't care less. The corporate BS while the ship's sinking. Employees are jumping ship faster than rats fleeing a sinking boat. After being stabbed in the back one too many times, they're saying "adios" to AEP. And who can blame them? This place used to be a rock of stability, but now it's a sinking ship with a captain who's lost the plot. And get this – rumor has it there's a shadowy Minneapolis mafia pulling strings behind the scenes, deciding who stays and who goes. It's like a cheesy mob movie they're wielding spreadsheets, cabalism, nepotism, favoritism and cronyism like a sledgehammer.

But here's the kicker – if a bunch of folks walk out the door, maybe the higher-ups will wake up and smell the coffee. Maybe they'll realize they've shot themselves in the foot and beg those experienced vets to come back. Because let's face it, you can't run a company on fresh-faced newbies alone. In summary? AEP since Therace arrived has become a sh-tshow , and slapping on a band-aid won't cut it. They need a complete overhaul, top to bottom. Because right now, it's like trying to clean up a cesspool with a toothbrush – pointless and disgusting.

I know I would have taken it if I was eligible. Morale is at an all time low. Mgmt doesn't really care, they really don't. Everything they say and do is just lip service. If we coat the entire pig, it'll look better. Still a pig under all of that lipstick. When I do leave, I will never look back. I will never recommend the company to anyone unless there is a major overhaul of upper mgmt and the Board. Maybe there were problems but you ki-led the patient to cure the disease. Looking forward to the day I get to walk away from this place.

How many have taken the lay off/ buy out ?

I dont know about you all but after a few years here I’ve decided to take the severance and go do something else. This company has hurt me enough by taking away every reason I took the job. If you’re considering leaving I hope you remember to mark yes by the 6th at 6pm so you can go do something better… I wanted to have a long career here and every job will have its things. But I’m not staying where they completely changed how I work after being told nothing was going to change and leaving a good job because I wanted those benefits. Not too mention how my department has been talked down to and made to feel as if we don’t matter. Best of luck to those of you who stay, but I am done and support everyone who wants to leave in doing so.

If the new CEO requires all EVPs to live and work in Columbus, you know she won't move. If she had any interest in moving out of Minnesota she would have done it already. Alberto proved you could work in Columbus but live in Chicago.
Even that took a toll on him but the end of the week. Would be nice to have Alberto back.

https://www.investing.com/news/company-news/old-republic-director-therace-risch-buys-181k-in-stock-93CH-3415142

Now, everyone cross your fingers and pray to whatever god you believe in that they take her d-mb a55...

Say you're right, 1000 people take the offer and leave. The majority will be older employees with a lot of knowledge gone and cannot be replaced. So in a year or two, you'll see a number of these folks come back as contractors. I've seen it time and time again, if you need a job done, you have to have someone who knows what to do. So let's call Bob and see if he'll come back for a year, which then turns into years.

As the buzz word management at AEP used to use to manipulate workers to work harder and free overtime by inciting so and so is (bluhhh) “low energy”, they should just layoff ALL non- management employees and dive in and send profits through the roof with high energy mania! Could even get some of the managers into some cheerleader outfits and have them do a A! E! P! in same fashion as they do O! H! I! O! to get the energy flowing!

@1Iuyz+1qB6FXi3
They said they're aiming to recoup $100 million.
If you assume an average salary of $100k that works out to about 1000 jobs.

For anyone from AEP mgmt monitoring this, what you're reading is only the tip of the iceberg. Things are rotten to the core right now. Management needs to start earning that MBA and try to figure out how to stop the bleeding. The talent is leaving and will never come back. You can blow it off as people not understanding what the big picture is. AEP hired some really smart people in the past, not so much any more.

@1Iryb+1qB6FXi3 yes AEP is treating it's employees like cr-p and from the IT side, yes it is Therace's failure, all of it. She is the worse CIO the company has had so far. The woman does not know how to run an IT department. She's blown through budgets like there wasn't one. She blames all of the old mgmt staff so she can bring in one of her cronies or worse yet, give the manager position to a former TCS manager. Talk about the fox guarding the hen house. I doubt she knows how to spell ethics.

@1Iogp+1qB6FXi3
It was 7000, it's x number from 7000. Right now that number based on rumors is somewhere between 1500 to 2000. not 7000. That's why people went off on you, AEP is not laying off 7000. The part that hurts it the other 9600 folks are not allowed to even decide if they want to.

Do people really think that AEP is just terrible and they will find a magic unicorn employer that will make them feel warm and fuzzy inside when they leave? Folks welcome to corporate America in 2024.
Many of you don’t like the current culture because the business today doesn’t allow middle managers to make questionable and often ethically challenged decisions anymore - that makes those who were comfy and felt like they had some sort of special power feel useless.

Yeah we saw you, and many people are still cleaning up messes left by people who aren’t TR.

Interesting that some of the posts that are just harmless statements are getting down. I guess aep has their social media teams monitoring the boards. Have at it aep - you still su-k

I posted the dispatch link on Reddit with the headline that AEP was set to layoff over 7000 employees by July. I was met with a barrage of hate - being called a fear mongering tool, among a slew of other terrible comments. Tho I explained that voluntary severance is a pretty corporate phrase for saying layoff, only 2 people understood it meant layoffs (former Columbia gas workers who worked there when they were asked to volunteer to lose their jobs). My point Is I’m afraid the general public does not understand what it means either because of the language AEP purposely used. I think we need to spread the word of what’s really happening so people outside of the organization understand that the company wants to get rid of nearly half the company. The company wants people to “volunteer” to not get their hands dirty while protecting their image. I’m going to post more Glassdoor, all social media sites, Reddit again (someone had my post removed) anywhere I can think off. The more of us who put it out there that theses are layoffs, the more the people will understand what’s actually happening

This has been in the works since Sloate was appointed CEO. Her sole purpose was to lead the “reconstructing” and sale AEP Energy’s unregulated renewable energy portfolio. There was a hiring freeze that started late 2022, shortly after she was appointed and this was the beginning of the process. Upper management was already planning layoffs and anticipated they would start in Summer of 2023. The process of selling the unregulated renewable energy portfolio to IRG took longer to work out than the company anticipated, which is why the layoffs were pushed to February.

Additionally, to get out of the dark money scandal a few years ago, AEP entered into a contract with the city of Columbus and many others across the state to be the sole energy supplier. It’s like a plea deal that allows the state profit and AEP just got a slap on the hand.

@1Hwes+1qB6FXi3 - It is perfectly fine to feel upset about seeing something you care about a lot decline and to see the situation as a potential for personal change/growth. People can walk and chew gum at the same time.

I would contend that as a company a big part of why we are where we currently are is an ongoing preference to be and reward pollyannas that focus on collectively sweeping anything even slightly negative under the rug and instead prioritizing rooting out any "negative nancy" who even acknowledges that the rug possibly has things under it at all.

This company is truly a dumpster fire.
Middle to upper management has the idea of constant change will make things run better , we cannot get adjusted to yesterdays changes before the procedure changes again. They are running around changing things just to say look at me and what I did.

On an optimistic note; perhaps this is an opportunity. Often we get stuck in a place not realizing there is something better and different for us. Most often someone has to make the choice for us and knock us out of our comfort zone. I know a couple folks who have been laid off recently, and have actually made a change for the better, both personally and professionally. As harsh as it may sound, a company does not owe you anything. It is not much different than a company investing in you and then you to take a better paying position elsewhere with the knowledge and experienced you gained. So perhaps rather than a complaining attitude try to have a grateful heart, trust in yourself and those around you, and pursue something bigger and better. Good luck to all.

You're right,my day of caring for this company has come to an end. If the Board doesn't care, why should I. If the Board only cares about making a show of doing something and collecting the check why should I be any different. If the Board treats people as numbers, fine, I now now I'm a number and numbers don't have feelings. I'll collect my check and and at 5p I'm done for the day.

The motivation is gone. Most people I know at engineering, plan to leave AEP and are waiting for their 4 years experience to get PE. AEP has become the place to get experience and leave. I feel like people barely do their job, or they don't care about their designs anymore, so the cost of design is much higher than it should be.
In general, AEP is only alive because of its monopoly, the team is literally not even doing 50% in their work.

It's hard to keep going to work for a company that only a few years came to a grinding halt for half a day due to a datacenter power outage, yet now Therace has surrounded the hen house with foxes and it's only a matter of time until the company suffers a catastrophic failure or cyber attack far worse. The board doesn't care that everyone who cares about keeping AEP's systems safe and secure were pushed out or fired by Therace because those principals don't fit her agenda. They don't care that Therace's cronies have added event and security monitoring tools like Dynatrace that generate thousands of nonsense alerts and vulnerabilities so she can make it look like TCS is busy at work when they are accomplishing nothing but robbing our company of the finances they claim are so limited. While blowing all of our budget on nonsense work, she deprioritizes and cancels works to fix real security holes and then pushes out another security manager as a scapegoat anytime one of our systems is taken over by a hacker. All the while she opens up all of our secure NERC environment to incompetents in India so they can mishandle and leak all of our critical systems to foreign nationals. I almost want to be laid off so I don't have to keep witnessing this gross misconduct and borderline treason. Traitor Therace.

My biggest complaint about the entire mess is, you have people that want to leave and maybe can financially handle a buyout and then you have others that may not have a choice in a month that can't. Why not just let those that want to go from the entire pool of employees just take the money and leave. I'm in both camps, I don't want to leave but I could maybe if it was 5 years from now. However, if I could leave now and was told I couldn't, I'd be pi$$ed. These buy outs happens once every 15 years, if you miss it, it might not happen again when you come close to retirement.

I’m wondering how many people’s district manager is telling them the same thing we are getting told in my department. We are being told that everything will be fine in our department and we won’t be losing people if there is an involuntary severance yet we are eligible for this severance. I don’t trust it at all and sounds like what a manager would say in any situation.

What could be done to get rid of the new regime? I like that someone went to the Columbus Dislatch about the buyout. Maybe that’s all we can do. If you know anyone remotely in media reach out to them and share details with them. You can remain anonymous. Hurting the stock price by bad press is probably the only way to get the board to change course. Or at least speed up the Therace exit timeline.

I would love to know how many new employees we’ve brought on from Minnesota since 2020. I know of 12+ personally. All of which are high paying jobs. How is nepotism of that magnitude allowed? I know nepotism alone isn’t illegal, but if someone else applied and got passed up in favor of someone Therace and her buddies know then that discrimination. Which is illegal. There’s too many of them for it to not be true, at the very least once. The Minnesota Mafia is ruining AEP.

https://www.dispatch.com/story/business/2024/04/27/aep-targets-job-reductions-through-voluntary-severance-program/73453338007/

The comments on employee morale being included are interesting. Can't help but think that the media is finally catching on that something is up around here worthy of more attention from them.

AEP did the same in 2010; back than they already had the contractors to replace who they did not need.

@1Cixx+1qB6FXi3
I just read your post and I got to thinking, did they actually have that in mind knowing they were going to have all of these cuts? It makes you wonder if all of this was in the works for the past 9-10 months. Get rid of the survey BEFORE we start cutting the employees. We do not need to have those left slam management for the cuts. Doesn't look good and it was part of the ICP. Now they can just ignore the side effects of the cuts because there is no feedback to the management team. All of the other "surveys" that are posted on the internal site are handled by HR and Corp Comm who are going to tow the company message. Most don't care what JD Powers, Gallup, or JUST Jobs have to say about the company, they mean nothing to most of the employees.

A week closer to retirement or a layoff. At this point in my 30+ years at AEP, not sure which will happen first. It feels like I've worked for 4 different companies in that time. The pre-merger with CSW, Post-merger, the Lean years and now the Dark Ages with the Black Death. This by far is the worse of them. If we get out of this mess, I will hope the next stage will be a Renaissance. For that to happen, change has to come with a complete overhaul of upper-level managers and not the grunts in the trenches. And please for God sake, get rid of TCS. Cap Gemini or Accenture would have been a better choice if we had to have IT outsourced.

Let the firings continue until morale improves.

Let the purges begin. Long live the state. Are they going to start offering bonuses if we rat out people who are unhappy soon?

I LOVED AEP. I was there 18 years and loved it until Therace came in and destroyed morale, the culture, and the feeling that AEP cared about the employees. This is what hiring an unqualified person for the sake of diversity. I was SHOCKED when I was let go in January. It’s very sad to see what has happened to the IT organization. I used to recommend people to work at AEP. Not anymore. So sad. I loved working there and planned on retiring from there. :-(

IT has been tasked to do broad keyword searches on all corporate owned devices. The word "Therace" is on the list of flagged words. Do with that info what you will.

A career at AEP, I had to laugh. That died in May, 2020. From the very beginning it's been you can and will be replaced at our whim. You're lucky to have a job and when we decide you can be replaced by some guy in India, you're gone. The former AEP managers are so scared they'll do anything to keep their jobs because they know she'll replace them with a cronie or a TCS contractor.

Read Therace's email to IT and it's absolutely pathetic. The woman has no clue what she sowed. She thinks it's great we cut IT to point where the limbs are barely hanging on, projects cut, maintenance put off, people cut and we're doing great. Anyone who can afford to retire, do so. Do not stick around. If you can get another job, leave. Give your 2 weeks and just leave for a place that will give you a career and not just a paycheck.

Ops leadership is very good at picking the d-mbest strategy and then being advised by HR and Comm leadership on the least effective means of communicating it. The past year has demonstrated that this is a company full of mediocre-to-terrible individuals in middle management and higher ranks, when it comes to actual work, whose only actual strengths are personal branding and mutual self-fluffing of everyones brilliance in that club.