Greed is not good - Anonymous employee Zayo Employee Review

Zayo has been steadily declining ever since the company went public. Pre-IPO, Zayo was a company that moved fast, where new ideas were encouraged and accepted, and where every employee had a stake. It was run by professionals, who knew their business, and who were willing to think long-term-strategically. Just about the only negative thing you could have said about Zayo in those days was that it was too small, and struggled with addressing "big" challenges for our customers. Then Zayo went public. The executives got to celebrate this, while employees who contributed to it got to sit at headquarters and watch our execs celebrate. This should have been our first hint that the times, they were a-changing. Ever since, there has been a slow drain of talent, especially executive talent, as the people who worked so hard to take Zayo public have begun to retire to take their victory laps. As those talented individuals left, they were replaced by external hires whose primary recommending quality appears to be that they worked with Dan (or some other exec) at Level 3. To the surprise of absolutely no one, these replacements have gone about re-creating Level 3's culture here at Zayo. What is that culture? Well, it's the kind of high-pressure, low-reward culture that employees have always fled from. The kind of place where reorgs are constant, chaotic, and demotivating. It's a short-sighted culture, where the only thing that matters is this quarter's "number" (i.e. our Equity IRR target, which is completely un-moored from reality, for the quarter). Nevermind that many of the items that contribute to this quarter's number began in prior quarters, and nevermind that there are long-term strategic initiatives that, if begun today and maintained, would drive results for future quarters. These things are perceived to only get in the way of driving this quarter's number, and are verboten. Ironically, this is also a culture that moves...very...slow. Nothing can seem to get done in less than a week at Zayo, no one seems to want to do anything without obtaining approval from their management chain, and agenda-less meetings (required before taking any sort of action) are constant . Last but not least, it's a culture where managers seem to be encouraged to only look out for themselves and their favored employees, feeding toxicity into their interactions with anyone else. To summarize - Zayo is the kind of place where 5 consecutive quarters of 50% bonus payouts are blamed on employees "not executing", and left at that. It is hard, as an individual contributor, to see how things at Zayo can continue in this way. Zayo's challenges are so many, and so diverse, and Zayo's culture has become so toxic and averse to actually implementing feedback, that any kind of course correction seems like a pipe dream. The joke used to be that someday, Zayo'd buy Level 3 and become "Level Z".