• Somewhere Fractal lost the balance of being profitable and maintaining “People Principles”. Very much focused on margins and revenue now. I do not see anything wrong with it, the sole purpose of a company is to give RoI to stakeholders; but now it is like the any other company which they earlier did not intend to and had a lot of focus on the culture.
• Different culture for lateral hires and home-grown talent: A lot of people wrote about too much power in the hands of people who had joined the company in the forming years. Nothing wrong with that, most start-ups if they grow well do reward their founding team members with faster growth. Though in Fractal, it is impacting the company negatively by these folks not being groomed to handle roles at senior leadership level and being dependent on others a lot. Also, this has been demotivating lateral hires who have seen best practices in other companies but are side-lined by the home-grown talent.
• Top heavy structure: Fractal promoted people sooner in the earlier years which has led to a lot of mass in the Grade 5 and 6 level. While they do maintain the experience criteria while hiring laterally but internally the promotions are viewed as means of rewarding good work and not evaluating preparedness for the role. This has led to people in mid-management and still do not have the maturity or experience in handling client conversations or driving programs or strategy
• No career planning: With the new focus on billing, margins, revenue etc. managers stopped being mentors and are merely focusing on how they can get billed people for their projects. No one has imbibed the thinking of ‘Human Capital’ than ‘Human resources’. They do not check on your career focus, vision or have time to invest in people - this has led to blurred job descriptions and specially so in the US and EU.
• Lack of stability: owing to the nature of projects onsite employees are expected to move for short term projects on an urgent basis. The company does not provide travel support if the project is more than 3 months in duration. Employees with families are finding it difficult to sustain in this environment.
