Management seems to behave as if the very people who make up the company are a liability. The stale practice of reducing overhead by reducing perks, training, benefits, and ultimately staff while raising the demands and stakes of productivity appears to be in effect here, and seems to win out over any fresh vision or grassroots innovations.
I felt that capable people did not get enough opportunities to exercise their intelligence or take calculated risks, or frankly to even operate, fully-empowered, within their existing roles and responsibilities. On the flip side, I sometimes found myself in contact with people who displayed astonishingly poor skills or bad attitudes, and I would wonder when management would intervene to help that person or replace them with someone more appropriate.
Higher-ups seemed to often think and act for the people who answered to them, despite the fact that these higher-ups sometimes exhibited little understanding of the relevant realms of expertise. When things turned out poorly, it was then the staff who were burdened with repairing the problems they had already warned against, if they were not simply laid off in yet another phase of "fixing" problems by outsourcing more lines on the accounting spreadsheet. I did not often witness management suffering for their poor decisions or execution (full disclosure: I worked in administrative services during my tenure here which of course is a favorite budgetary target).
In the rare moments that opportunities to think outside the box were extended, they seemed to be less a revolution in empowerment and more an excuse for management to preen, as if to say they were responsible for the fresh air coming through the window they finally opened. Yearly, compulsory employee satisfaction surveys were likewise just a routine. I did not see anything revolutionary emerge from these.
From one perspective, none of this is different from any other classic corporation. However, today some companies are acknowledging, empowering, and rewarding the vast skill and potential of their employees, and both sides benefit greatly by this more democratic model. I feel that AECOM denies the evidence and power of this openness and innovation except inasfar as the utility of the model as a public image. Unfortunately, their sheer immensity seems to insulate them against the need to meaningfully evolve.
As a secondary note, administrative bureaucracy here was a catastrophe of inefficiency. I always felt awful for the staff who were at the mercy of the broken support arm of this company. Ultimately, it comes to the same thing: I do not blame the support staff themselves so much as the moldy systems they were compelled to use and the meager support *they* received.
