#culture

This worrying trend of "side hustles" has me concerned for the support I (won't) get from colleagues when needed.

I have emailed senior management regarding engineers circumventing their Teams statuses, mainly via scripts, in order for DXC to start looking into ways of identifying those responsible.

I doubt anything will happen but hopefully we can rid the company off these non-team players. I recommend doing the same. A few colleagues are following suit this morning and sending their own concerns.

Mass layoffs are increasingly common, often involving thousands of roles at once. How senior leaders handle these decisions profoundly impacts organizational trust, talent, and performance. Research indicates that while layoffs offer short-term financial relief, they can damage long-term engagement and institutional knowledge. Effective leadership during layoffs requires clear rationale, human conversation, and dignified treatment of employees. Companies must prioritize support and transparency to maintain a strong culture.

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/layoffs-leadership-test-executives-193830410.html

Remember when vz paid Tom Brady hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to HQ and say we were winners immediately after a VSP and a year before the biggest layoff ever? And during a period of losing big time to T-Mobile? Hilarious. Smoke and mirrors are the foundation of this mess and nothing has changed since.

Best place to work at. /sarcasm

Has anyone considered that all of these post might be from upper level management to try to constantly scare us into doing more work than is required of us?

As an Ex-Frontier person I was warned about the culture in Verizon.

Boy were they right - it is deeply, deeply toxic. Battle hardened silos, everyone covering their as--s, no one accountable for decisions, leadership that doesn’t have a clue about leading (or telecoms for that matter), passive aggressive behaviors everywhere and at the top of it all a bunch of leaders who are happy clappy about the future with no real desire to lean in to changing the underlying culture. So no surprise that the awesome team at Frontier has now almost all left. Will be fascinating to see how the financial performance of the old Frontier business develops, or will it become invisible and quietly disappear to be written off, just as with all VZ acquisitions. Remember Blue Jeans, Yahoo, Terramark etc etc. The street should be punishing these guys.

any company in the world, after certain growth it becomes mature, lackadaisical, entitled, and full of you know what! That is where Nike is and stuck!!
Unable to crawl out of sh4t pile that they slipped and fell.

EH just joined Nike when they came out with "Just Do It" campaign because they were young and hungry while living on the edge. Now, JDI means how to print on the T=shirt and sell it for $25.00 when it cost only $3.00 to produce.

Nike only know how to play prevent defense and that will prevent you from winning.
According to dearly departed John Madden

• Layoffs: Ongoing fear of continued or phased layoffs; perception of quiet reductions and outsourcing
• Leadership: Low trust in executives; frequent criticism of decision-making and communication
• Culture: Reports of low morale, cynicism, and “toxic” or inconsistent management
• RTO policies: Major frustration with inconsistent return-to-office enforcement across teams
• Pay & reviews: Belief that raises and ratings are predetermined; weak merit increases and bonuses
• Career growth: Limited advancement opportunities; employees feel stuck or disengaged
• Attrition: High voluntary turnover, especially among experienced staff
• Technology concerns: Anxiety about AI replacing roles and increased employee monitoring
• Workplace stress: Frequent mentions of burnout and mental health strain

Overall: Negative sentiment centered on job security, leadership trust, and workplace consistency

Windstream/Kinetic employee here looking for advice or feedback on all your former leaders coming over here. They are not making friends and ripping the company that we spent nearly a decade building apart. They have come in like a wrecking ball and it seems if you are not part of their inner circle then you don’t mean anything to them. They might be smart folks but their people skills are awful and the only opinions they care about are their buddies they brought over. Are you happy they are gone or do you miss them? Help me understand my future lol

The whole world is changing to work from home due to energy crisis.Only these jokers ask everyone to come in person on all 5 days,badge in badge out..
Wonder where the priorities are.Org changes across the board by new SLT.Hopefully that revives the titanic

Let me describe how this place works. First pillar, punishment. Make a small error and they'll remind you for months. Second pillar, fear. Nobody feels safe. Everyone's waiting for the other shoe to drop. Third pillar, favoritism. Certain people can do no wrong. They get the promotions, the good projects, the protection. Everyone else gets the scraps. That's the culture. That's how they run things. And it's not just unpleasant, but also abusive. It wears you down until you don't even remember what normal feels like.

People keep trying to make this about generations. Older workers don't get younger workers. Younger workers resent older workers. That's not the real problem. The real problem is the gap between everyone who does the work and the executives who make the decisions. That's the only divide that matters.

Compared to other companies, our layoffs are both smaller and not as frequent.

What's happening with HPE? One week something is fine, the next week it’s not allowed anymore. We only find out after the fact when someone flags it. For the past year I've felt like I'm always one step behind something we weren't even notified changed. How are we supposed to work like this?

We're the ones who keep overextending ourselves to cover for those who are cut. We do it over and over again. If we all just stopped, they wouldn't be able to do this anymore. Work wouldn't get done. There would be consequences for their actions. As it is right now, we just keep rewarding them.

We spend a lot of time discussing what needs to be done. Then we discuss it again. And again. Meanwhile, the actual work barely moves. When did we turn into a company where every single thing has to be discussed into oblivion before anything can be done?

How much money did we waste on Metaverse? Upwards of $90 billion? It was obvious for years it was a bust but when somebody's ego is so big they can't accept that their brilliant idea is pure sh-t, that's what you get. How many jobs that money could have saved?

There are things that clearly aren’t working, but no one says it directly. Instead, we just keep adjusting around them. It feels like everyone sees it, but no one wants to be the one to call it out. So it just continues. Because that's so much better and productive than actually fixing the issue, right?

The bodies are there but the people aren't. Hundreds have already left in their heads. We do the minimum, watch the clock, and wait for the day we can physically leave too. Schwab did this to itself.

You ask three people the same question and get three different answers. All of them sound confident too. So it turns into a game of eeny, meeny, miny, moe to decide what to do. And if you get the wrong one, guess whose fault it is? This whole place has turned into one big joke.

I know this is not layoffs related, but it's been bugging more and more since it's slowing me down and it might affect my future here. We send out docs ahead of time for every single meeting, but it’s obvious no one reads them. Then the meeting turns into reading the doc out loud and re-explaining everything. I don’t understand why we even bother sending materials in advance at this point. It's slowing down the meeting, everything takes longer, and I have less time to do my actual job. How hard is it to get to a meeting prepared??

Morale at Cherry Point feels like it’s at a historic low. What was once considered a standout site in the Pacific Northwest, known for its strong culture and sense of family, feels very different today.

Many employees feel disconnected from leadership, and recent organizational changes have made the refinery feel unfamiliar to those who have been here for years. There’s a growing perception that leadership is not fully engaged with the workforce or the site’s legacy culture.

Recent safety concerns have only amplified these feelings. Employees want to feel heard, valued, and safe—and right now, there’s a noticeable gap between leadership decisions and workforce sentiment.

Cherry Point has always had the potential to be exceptional. The hope is that leadership will re-engage with the people on the ground and work to rebuild the trust and culture that once made this site so strong.

If you currently work here or have worked here recently, I’d be genuinely interested in hearing about your experience. Is this something others are seeing as well?

Been thinking about this a lot lately. Going back to four days a week in the office with the open plan unassigned seating (HMP) has definitely brought some good energy. You run into folks from different teams, have those quick real-time conversations, and get problems solved faster than the endless email chains we had before. Its helped cut down on friction and made collaboration feel smoother.

That said, I keep noticing how our field teams run on a solid 5-day rhythm and it shows in their consistency and momentum. Maybe bringing the office side to a full 5 days could line everything up even better across the company. Wrapping the week strong with everyone in on Friday, plus the occasional half-day on Saturday when it makes sense, might give us that extra edge to stay ahead of the competition and feel more like one-team.

Chevrons culture already feels special, and pushing a bit more on the in-office side could make it even stronger. Its one of the reasons Im still optimistic about sticking around long-term.

Anyone else seeing similar things? Especially curious how the current 4-day setup is landing for field and ops folks. Are you noticing quicker decisions or better handoffs, or do you think more consistent office time would help?

More ad campaigns with exclusionary b.s.

Hot. Mess.

Wow. Just ... WOW.

I came here excited about the work. I was full of ideas and wanting to make things better. Open Text took all of that from me. They don't cultivate innovation. They don't even pretend to. Any new idea gets met with bureaucracy, indifference, or outright hostility. And the toxicity, the constant politics and fear and backstabbing, it leaches into you. I noticed my creativity slipping away. First the big ideas stopped coming, then the small ones, and now I don't even try. If you're still new here, get out before you become as disillusioned as me.

So many posts about EIA snub and no recognition highlighting individual accomplishments with EIA.

An EIA IMHO stands for excelling individual, yet if you win something and instead just receive "great job team" it tells you how Chennai connection or being in Bangalore-ham is what will make you be recognized.

A person with 5 yr anniversary gets all the accolades while the one who is celebrating 10 yr anniversary doesn't get nothing, coz they're not from the same region.

This culture is what drives toxic corporate politics in every team I have been part of since 6 years.

Anyone attend this past week? Really fun times. The executives are all so nice. I got to get a picture with Charlie he’s a super great guy. Informative info as well.

A senior manager recently left the company not because they were looking for a better position but they started looking for a better position when it was explained to them that it was better to have power point slides that showed everything was on target and budget and with green checkmarks than telling the truth.

The senior manger was working on some key project(s) that was integrating legacy systems between Xerox and Lexmark.


These are the type of leaders that we need to move forward with a healthy balance sheets — the ones that will speak truth to leadership but we have a leadership that isn’t interested in hearing and sharing up to the VP and EC levels.

It’s our lost as a company that this Senior Manager left. Hopefully this manager leaving will be a warning sign to leadership but somehow I doubt it.

This is the worst area to work in. The Directors are incompetent, treat their managers and direct reports with total disrespect under JS. Some of the Directors talk behind their direct reports back to other departments, accuse them falsely and are tanking their business lines. I heard the switch of Directors to other business lines is not going well and team members are aborting as fast as they can. Executives do not listen to team members who have been in PI working in this line of business for many years and are allowing incompetent Directors to mismanage teams and bully them. It’s awful what is happening in CCA(Complex Clinical Audit).

Truly fascinating how some people are able to identify every problem in the company with surgical precision, yet somehow remain here…contributing to all of them.

If we ever bottled the energy spent on complaining, predicting layoffs, and re-litigating leadership decisions from behind a keyboard, we’d probably solve margin pressure overnight.

It’s impressive really, how “culture” is always something management breaks, never something we all participate in.

And the confidence required to critique leadership while never having led anything beyond a Slack thread debate is honestly elite-level consistency.

At some point, you have to wonder if the issue isn’t the company…but the subscription.

Anyway, if all that energy got rotated into literally anything productive, $NKE would be at ATHs just off vibes alone

Highway to He-l by AC/DC

TLDR: It’s not one problem. It’s a broken culture, recycled leadership, slow everything, and no real accountability. Nothing changes until the people at the top do.

It’s the culture. It’s the nepotism. It’s the same insular leadership group playing musical chairs and calling it progress. Your reward for poor performance is getting moved to run another department.

It’s the fact that half the people on campus on any given day are contractors. It’s hard to build anything real when so much of the workforce is temporary and disconnected.

It’s us still working like it’s 2006 while most of corporate America is in 2026. Outdated systems, outdated processes, and no urgency to fix them. Ten year “transformations” that take one year at any competent company.

It’s the consultants who latch on and never leave. Endless decks, endless frameworks, no real accountability. Just more layers between the problem and anyone willing to actually solve it.

It’s a tech org that still acts surprised that global talent exists. It’s marketing that talks about the consumer like it only fits into narrow boxes instead of understanding how broad the audience actually is.

Too many people with “creative” in their title, not enough actual creative thinking. Safe ideas, recycled ideas, nothing that really pushes.

And all these posts about going back to some golden age miss the point. Those same problems existed back then. People just didn’t care as much because the company was winning and everyone had a job. The s-xism, the favoritism, all of it was there. It just got ignored. Then the company tried to correct course with DEI but a lot of that turned into people taking care of their own under a different label. Still no one said anything. Not really. Not until layoffs started hitting.

There is no course correcting this with the same people making the same decisions. It needs new leadership and a genuinely fresh perspective. That’s not impossible. Look at Abercrombie, Gap, Levi’s. Even Adidas managed to steady itself after the Kanye mess in a couple of years.

Culture starts at the top. Always has.

Toxic boss believes no one can look good besides the toxic boss.

So last July I was in SIU and got forced, with a two day notice, to move to Fire Claims. It took me 15 years to get to SIU, enjoyed my job and got good level 3 & 4 ratings. I do not have any fire claims experience. I absolutely loathe Fire claims and miserable every day. This place is a total sh-t hole! So our SM was in our huddle this week and basically said we are overstaffed in certain areas in Fire claims and we should expect some changes coming soon. Going to need less people...also there will be no new hiring in 2026! I've only been out of training now for 8 months and basically what they are trying to do is fire anyone and everyone due to overstaffing. This really is a complete and total evil clueless company! Stay away and go find something else to do!

Such a waste of time. The only measurable outcome is my rising blood pressure.

It’s convenient to blame engineers at every level, but management seems to operate in a different accountability universe—one where failure has no real consequences.
At the LL6, LL5 level and above, you see the same pattern of weak, indecisive leadership repeating the same mistakes quarter after quarter. There’s little ownership, no urgency to correct course, and no visible standard for performance. Yet the paychecks keep coming, funding comfortable lifestyles that appear completely detached from the results they deliver.
What’s worse is the revolving door. Ineffective managers get swapped out, only to be replaced by equally ineffective ones. Nothing improves because the system itself tolerates—and even rewards—mediocrity. It’s not just an individual failure; it’s structural.
At that point, calling it a product-driven organization feels dishonest. It looks far more like a closed circle protecting itself—an insular social club that talks strategy but consistently fails to execute anything of real substance.

How hard they are trying to find people to get rid of. Multiple ways of tracking the same work, how often you're moving the mouse, clicking, and typing. Whether your work can be replaced by a push-button workflow.

Capitalism is showing just how ruthless it truly is.

Remember, at the end of the day everyone is replaceable. Never think you aren't. Don't ever work harder than you think you should. Just get your work done, go home be with family , take care of your health before any damn job. Sometimes less is more.