A sinking ship - terrible leadership, no growth, continuous layoffs
Pros
There can be a decent work-life balance, as long as you don't care about doing meaningful or impactful work. (If you are passionate and care about making a difference, you'll likely end up burned out.) Working with amazing people used to be a pro here, but so many of our strongest people have started leaving and relationships with coworkers feel more disconnected and insincere as there is less job security and people (understandably) feel like they need to protect their jobs.
Cons
Leadership from top to bottom is out of touch and lacks any transparency. They cheer and keep saying how great we're doing, while still doing layoffs and cutting raises, bonuses, and promotions. There is no room for growth here and many are grossly underpaid since promotions and raises have been cut for almost two years now. This company expects you to "go above and beyond" and over-perform before ever being rewarded with an actual promotion or raise, and now we have hundreds of passionate, high performing employees who have been overworked and underpaid for far too long. Our executives also recently announced that "right sizing" and layoffs will continue to be a regular practice, so there is no job security. We went from a company that said they would never do layoffs to a company that is constantly "trimming the fat". The lack of strategic leadership on the People team is astonishing. Everyone is at the whim of the executives and people are supposed to chase their constantly changing goal posts instead of working towards common strategic objectives. This makes internal team members' work extremely challenging and negatively impacts the experience for all of our people across Slalom. There is very little team work at this company. The culture is very individualistic and competitive, and leadership is very "every man for himself". Our leaders spend more time speaking than listening because self-promotion is essential to their success at Slalom, and people in non-leadership roles are seldom involved in decision making, but are expected to deliver on unrealistic plans. Our executive leaders continue to blame the company's poor performance and the need for layoffs and cutbacks on "market conditions" rather than take responsibility for the decisions that they have made that put us in this position. This company has continued to run the same way for 20 years, and now we are feeling the effects of that. Teams are highly siloed and internal processes are antiquated and inefficient. Slalom rode the waves when times were good and marketed themselves on a platform of being "fiercely human". I remember hearing our CEO, Brad Jackson, say a few years go that we only made money because we took care of our people first - but when they had to actually make decisions and back that up, their true colors started to show. Our executives failed to respond and adapt quickly enough when the market shifted - they held firmly to the way things had always been done. They made poor decisions and when push came to shove, they prioritized their profits over their people. Which, yes, is like any other corporation - but Slalom executives got rich on the platform of being "fiercely human" and then abandoned and exploited the very people who made them rich.
