Things started to go downhill when the CEO changed... The loyalty from the Christchurch employees was repaid with redundancy, without even the opportunity for continuing to work for the company remotely. The years of knowledge and experience that were held within the Christchurch office were invaluable, and instead of offering any of us the opportunity to carry on working remotely for the company (even when we offered to work in different timezone hours), we were flatout told no. The reason given for the office closure and redundancies was the timezone difficulties, which was a line that nobody ever believed. All the people I worked with in the company went out of our way to work in with those in other timezones, and we were very successful at it. The real reason operations were moved to Budapest was for the company to pay less in salary/wages. Once the decision was made, and the teams in Budapest were started up, the entire top management in the company essentially forgot that the staff in Christchurch existed, and that we were still expected to continue to get releases out as well as train up our replacements. All successes in terms of releases were attributed to the new offices and teams, and there was absolutely no acknowledgement that those of us who continued on in Christchurch were even part of it all. The huge wait time between being advised of our redundancies and our actuall rolloff dates was SO long, which was purely to the benefit of the company. It was so they could continue to leverage our massive amounts of knowledge and experience. No option was given to anyone at all to bring their redundancy date forward, which lead to so many people resigning rather than work in such a toxic environment for management that clearly didn't care about us at all. I know whoever replies to this from Diligent will acknowledge that it was a difficult time for everyone, but that it was what was best for the company. That's just a line that they tell themselves because they just don't want to admit how absolutely damaging it was to staff to make them stay on and train their replacements when they loved their jobs so much and thought they'd have them for years. They tell us that they were doing such a good thing by paying us out so much for our redundancy payments, but the fact that we had to stay on for 18 months or more in a company that clearly didn't want us, was soul crushing. Many decided to leave. I wish I'd not needed the money!
