Birch Communications reviews

There was little communication to the employees after the merger. Morale went down the toilet. Virtually none of the Cbeyond executives were held over and many Director level and management people were laid-off in the first few weeks. Entire departments and groups were eliminated. This is expected for duplicate functions, but some groups didn't have a Birch counterpart. Some groups were very busy while other teams just sat at their desks and either socialized or web surfed with no direction. Of folks remaining after the first month there was no one on one communication as to what your future might be with Birch. At that point, many valuable folks started leaving on their own even though Birch might have planned to keep them. I would venture to say that a large percentage of the remaining Cbeyond employees started looking for alternative work out of a feeling of self preservation. Policy changes were also communicated abruptly. The Monday after the acquisition was finalized, All evidence of Cbeyond was removed from the walls and displays. It just disappeared. Conference rooms were filled with whiteboard, furniture and other items deemed unnecessary. Chairs were moved around so that all matched on a floor. Desk appearance and dress code rules were published in the first week with little more than a weekend to comply (from a jeans and t-shirt environment to business casual. It is kind of funny because when the acquisition was announced we were told the cultures were a very close match. Turned out nothing could be further from the truth.

First, don't let Birch fool you - Access Integrated Networks is the old company name. This is Birch.com Birch Communications, the one in Macon, GA and Kansas that has now acquired Cbeyond and is headquarted in Atlanta. I don't understand how they are able to hide behind an old name here. My cons are all since the acquisition, as are my ratings. I am still in shock of what has happened to the wonderful company and culture that was Cbeyond. First there were many things not going well with Cbeyond, I suspect this is one of the reasons the company was sold. Birch has done 25 acquisitions and we are reminded of this fact every single day multiple times by the Birch leadership. The Birch leadership is really bad. They are incredibly inexperienced, seem to not worked anywhere other than Birch and are not even intelligent enough to engage with the leadership of Cbeyond that is still employed. Several of the VP and higher leaders would barely be leadership candidates at a company the size of Cbeyond. When you injection their actual abilities it is humorous to say the very least. No clue what they are doing. Very unprofessional. Keep telling everyone you know how to do everything better, that makes people want to work for you and stay at the company - NOT. The things written here by someone else about taking the chair and whiteboards and telling people to take all their personal items home are 100% true. I don't understand how you have time to worry about those things right after an acquisition of a company 4 times larger than you ever dreamed to be but that most certainly is not how you win anyone over. Neither is nitpicking every little thing. Neither is complaining that you don't like chairs that don't match on a floor. You realize there is a business to run don't you Birch? With real customers, not POTS line and DSL lines, but real customers running real companies using Cbeyond services that you now own??????? Get a clue, this isn't a payphone business. And good luck with your system integration. I keep hearing from IT that you are converting to all Birch systems. Can't wait to see how that works out for you. The shame is that people don't like you or trust you enough now to keep you out of trouble and will gladly watch you mess that up. The layoffs are the latest. No communicating with existing leaders that our people were being let go? They just got called into conference rooms? No asking leaders WHO should be let go so we could could weigh in on who should be trimmed back? Did you really mean to lay off a woman that is in the middle of treatments for a very serious disease? Laying off a new person in an area while letting go of someone that has years of experience? Who is behind the curtain making all these decisions? Oh that's right, the one you are all scared for your life of - the CEO. Birch decided they could do without all of the sr. executives of the company. There were some incredibly talented people that were not even considered or spoken to about staying with the new combined entity. This was a huge mistake. I can't wait to see who we acquired next so we can watch it get even worse. I have no clue why anyone with talent would stay here. I am trying to leave everyday as there is no upside.