- Executive culture: performative control, mandatory wallpaper, pointless meetings.
This is a company where the leadership will go out of their way to ensure that you know they are in charge and that they will punish you "just because". They track attendance for even the most ineffective meetings and force your immediate supervisor to reprimand you for missing them. Recently, they rolled out a change to mandate that the background on your computer shows their list of priorities and you cannot change it.
This is the behavior of leadership that relies on coercion instead of credibility. Beyond the embarrassing display of insecurity from senior leadership, it’s a huge sign of a woefully unqualified executive management team to think that anyone is going to look at it and I’m not saying that to be petty. Employees that are busy working aren’t going to stop and admire a navy blue list of poorly defined objectives just because someone tried to force them to.
Based on the pattern of behavior, compulsory meetings and forced computer wallpaper are just this year’s RTO. This “grabbing of the leash” is not something you see from executive management teams that know what they are doing. Perhaps Thoma Bravo will catch on eventually and find an effective leadership team.
This year, the mandatory wallpaper, a.k.a, The Rally Cry has 20-30 objectives on it that are a haphazard buffet of poorly defined whims that contain very few concrete achievable or measurable objectives. One major theme has been increased pressure for all employees to find ways to use AI to make themselves more efficient or improve processes. On its face, it could possibly be a good starting point towards a measurable goal in a world where AI as an alleged industry isn’t stripmining the planet so that a fake person can give you inaccurate information. Actually publishing such an unclear objective speaks to the lack of maturity in the executive management team.
Telling employees to “use AI to be more efficient and improve processes” is a joke at best. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s not tangible. It’s just another whim, brought to you by the same people that think forced computer wallpaper is a valid form of textual communication.
- Talent management: rigged reviews, hidden weighting, weak raises, offshoring threat.
No matter how hard you work or how well you perform, your effort will be diminished by human resources in order to reduce annual merit increases. Evidence of your performance will not count in your favor. The reason for this is because of how the annual review process actually functions at its core. The company will surprise everyone that it’s time to do annual reviews again and that you have a week to do them. This is most likely so that stragglers get completely screwed by not being able to submit their reviews on time. Then, you will hear nothing for 4-6 months, after which you will most likely get a review that attempts to average you out in some areas where you’ve performed highly. The reason for this is simple.
They spend the next several months personally going through all reviews. If your immediate supervisor gave you a good review for something with evidence, they will be expected to defend it. If that wasn’t bad enough, you’ll eventually come to find out that though they let you rate your performance in an area in a standard way (1-5 where 1 is below expectations and 5 is exceeding expectation), the areas are weighted and that weighting isn’t disclosed to you. This has the net result of lowering your overall performance in cases where you’ve met expectations. The most mind boggling part of this is that if they disclosed that an area was weighted, employees would place a higher priority on performing more highly in areas directly aligned with the computer wallpaper!
To continue on from the rigged performance reviews. Let’s say that you really knocked it out of the park and you’re lucky enough to have experienced the illustrious experience of receiving a 2-3% raise that won’t even match the cost of living or inflation, you’re only making yourself stand out and not in a good way. The unspoken threat will follow you every day that even if you’ve worked incredibly hard and increased your wages, they will find a way to offshore your position. They want you to do well, but not too well. Perhaps if they started investing in skill and talent, they wouldn’t feel the need for compulsory meetings because everyone would understand the assignment.
When you aren’t being forced to attend meetings that have little to no value, you may get to experience watching someone you know who was well qualified for a job get laid off in order for some person with an alphabet soup job title to bring in their friends. Month over month, year over year, the leadership of this company sacrifices talent and capability because it’s a never ending revolving door of nepotism.
