I've been working within the financial sector for most of my professional life (say 15 plus years). When asked whether or not we could have conversation with the CFO about the work load we were tasked with, I was told, "He's on the phone a lot" and we were not allowed to acknowledge the entire department was struggling to keep up on their assigned duties to upper management or anyone else within our company who depended on us to be efficient. Within the last year, Lower cut staffing in their finance department by more than 50 percent and proceeded to gaslight their new hires into believing they just needed to work extra hard to keep up. Managers proceeded to take multiple vacations during important times like end of the month and be completely out of touch with the day-to-day hiccups. I saw the CFO twice in the entire time I worked there. Once during my interview and once when he took me and a co-worker out to lunch because we were new hires. Otherwise he may as well be Santa Clause. There was no accountability, no acknowledgment of how badly run the entire department was and we were not allowed to discuss it with management or anyone else. When asked why the CFO was so inaccessible, I was told "he's just on the phone a lot". Every single one of my counterparts expressed concern about keeping up with the work load, we all said how stressful it was, how we are all very organized individuals but this particular job made us feel like we were merely treading water. Management refused to acknowledge the problem and preferred to use employees as scapegoats for their inadequacies. Working here was very similar to being in a relationship with a narcissist who creates an impossible environment and then insists it is everyone else's fault other than the people who created it in the first place. There is no direction, no accountability, no meaningful leadership, any ounce of productivity is stopped in it's tracks by the inability to provide tools such as an operating system that functions, you can't get approvals because the CFO must be on a hours-long phone call while he enjoys collecting a paycheck on the backs of working mothers who want to do a good job but slowly learn the odds are stacked against them. I was let go when my boss indicated I was not completing work. The prior evening I spent my time gathering invoices to input and then received a an email at 5:43AM the next day saying "I already did it since I was in the system anyway". Meaning my manager knew I was working on getting the work done and neglected to notify me she was doing it and then accused me of not doing any work and fired me.
