CBRE reviews

Too much office politics among upper management

For context I worked in the Digital and Technology / IT division; CBRE is huge so experiences will vary a lot by job role and location. 1. Over the last five years or so the D&T division was globally built up rapidly with limited planning or coordination with the wider company. Many but not all projects started with good intentions but lost focus on our users needs and have extremely low adoption as a result. Because of the high cost of investment the rest of the company is not happy with the results and everyone knows it. This has created a culture in D&T of extreme top down micromanagement that make it nearly impossible to make progress on customer outcomes due to constantly shifting priorities. The leadership is now scrambling to adapt and is not willing to take feedback from teams on the ground. 2. My former department was split between New York City and Seattle and collectively built some of the most highly adopted and well liked user centered technology products in the CBRE. In the last year a new set of D&T middle management came in and laid off half the department and outsourced work to a team of contractors in India. This was all before Covid19. Over the next nine months another 25% of the team left voluntarily (including me), because the new middle management team has been making decisions about product direction and team staffing that are so far in the wrong direction that our best option was to find new jobs during a pandemic induced recession. Now the team is wildly understaffed and the same middle management team that made all these decisions are shocked the team is struggling to produce and has low moral. And I felt like they were blaming our department for that outcome.