CEO needs to go - Anonymous employee Black & Veatch Employee Review

2.0
May 2, 2024
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great internal team and hard working people.

Cons

CEO does not care about his employees, his leadership consists of controlling & monitoring people as if we’re prisoners. Managers no longer have a say with their team when it comes to rules and regulations. Mario Azar has ruined the culture of this once great company. BV created a culture of flexibility with working hours. We were able to obtain an approval from our internal managers to have flexibility as parents as long as we worked our 8 hours & met our project/client needs. This was prior to COVID. We can all agree COVID changed everything. Although we are post COVID, working from home, producing higher numbers and productivity more than ever. He wants us hybrid. Which we can adjust and adapt. The problem now comes when he wants us in the office 8 hours on our hybrid days. With no flexibility. He won’t allow not even two hours of the day remote to help a single parent to pick up a child. This is controlling and not real leadership. This company is employee owned yet employees are not behind heard. Wish we could go back to 2018. Real leaders need to empathize and adapt themselves to the new times.

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Black & Veatch Response
2y
We appreciate you sharing your personal feedback with us. It saddens us to hear you have less than positive views of our leader, Mario. We understand the move to our hybrid work model more than a year ago was challenging for some professionals. Black & Veatch believes it was important to provide its professionals with flexibility while also enabling the benefits of in-person office collaboration. Navigating this new working model has brought challenges and opportunities. It seems there was a broad misinterpretation of the full day policy--for the more than two decades you've been with us, it has always been to work a full day in the office--8 or 9 hours whether or not you have a 9/80 schedule. Unfortunately, some are seeing it as something being taken away since they've been doing since we came back to the office, but the policy is not new. Our culture was, is and will continue to be strong!

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Black & Veatch Response
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Thank you for leaving a review! We appreciate the feedback!
1.0
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Fair starting compensation, the team I lead is very dedicated, the onboarding process is very smooth, there are opportunities to mentor and be mentored.

Cons

The current performance management process is deeply flawed. Leaders collect ratings from managers and supervisors, then gather in a room with peers to “calibrate.” During this meeting, a predetermined percentage of employees must receive low ratings. At one point, someone referred to this as “forced ratings,” and the IT leader became visibly upset, insisting that it was not. However, I was present for the discussion: we lowered ratings, checked the spreadsheet, lowered more ratings, checked the spreadsheet again, and repeated this cycle until we hit the percentage the IT leader said had to be met. From conversations with peers outside of IT, this appears to be a common practice across the organization. Unfortunately, the approach often results in employees receiving ratings that do not accurately reflect their actual performance. These artificially lowered ratings directly affect merit increases and bonuses—even if the bonuses are relatively small—creating consequences that feel at best unfair. Regardless of what label is used, the experience felt undeniably forced.

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