Eliminating Work from Home, Poor Work/Life Balance, Employees Treated as Disposable Commodities
Pros
Decent health plan (depending on where you live). Many nice people at the lower levels.
Cons
After being a work at home employee for well over a decade, the work at home program is being eliminated across the enterprise and associates will no longer be allowed this benefit (it's well-known that many of the executive leadership despise work at home and wear their distaste of it on their sleeve). As a result, everyone is now being forced to come in to the office even if, like me and many others, there will literally be no one in that office who you actually work with (so we'll still be working by ourselves the entire time, just now with terrible florescent lighting and uncomfortable office furniture). This is in addition to many divisions being consolidated down to a few key locations. If you're not in one of those cities, that's your problem. You may not get let go due to it (though you could), but you're certainly not going to be given new opportunities or move up the ladder either. There is absolutely zero communication from the top unless something directly impacts your specific team. The entire company is swirling in rumors because no one knows what's going on. We hear rumblings that there may be layoffs coming and then don't hear anything only to find out through various online forums that thousands were let go over the preceding months. You're constantly looking over your shoulder - 6 months, 6 years, 16 years. . .it doesn't matter if they can save money by getting rid of you and dumping your work onto someone else. I have personally been doing the work of 2-3 people as teammates leave for greener pastures and management refuses to replace them, though they keep promising (all for a sad 2% 'merit increase' each year even with top tier performance reviews). There is no concern for employee work/life balance. I've had weeks where I've worked 90-100 hours. E-mails at 2am? Not unusual. Working multiple weekends? If that's what it takes to meet unrealistic deadlines. It's like we're expected to work around the clock, particularly if you work with people all over the country. After discussing these long hours and the burnout associated with it with my manager, thank goodness they told me it was OK, after already putting in a full day of work, to take a break for an hour or so to spend with my friends/family before going back to work in the evening (/sarcasm). Of course, there are other systemic issues, but the above are some of the highlights. Morale is probably at the lowest I've seen it in all my years of working here. And, actually, as I write this I'm kind of wondering why I'm still here.