#employeerelations

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Today’s townhall was informative. It was made crystal clear that globalization and AI will continue to be the major priority/strategy of Optum.

Additionally, I found it ironic that they mentioned the concern of staff in Ireland, India, and the Philippines sometimes feeling left out, but no mention of the concern of workers in the United States related to continuous layoffs. I’m sure those in America being laid off feel way more left out.

I was just informed that our market is reducing the number of coaches in each store. Since I was the most recent addition to my current location, I’ll be transferring to another store in the market. Curious if anyone else has experienced this and if seniority is usually the deciding factor.

Buyout. No unemployment claims. No discrimination lawsuits. Improved morale for those who choose to stay.
But then, this is Verizon so…
Layoff. Unemployment claims across the board. Class action discrimination suits for each protected class (age, race, s-x). Fear and unrest for the employees not laid off.

I find the posts on Linkdin by various leaders at Verizon, to be completely tone deaf. Fancy dinners, and trips to Paris. Sure, it might be work related, but its a real slap in the face to be living it up in luxury while your employees are preparing for the worst. Do better.

Say you get RIF'd on 11/20 and have to work until end of Dec. How productive are you expected to be during those final 3-4 weeks?

If you had projects you were planning to finish before end of year, do you still complete those? How much effort do you put into offloading your work to another employee? Are you still expected to follow the 3/2 hybrid?

Or are you basically just doing minimal work during this time, and not coming into office?

What have you seen from lame duck employees in prior RIFs?

The last day was end of October.

So much for WF being a 'family'

I spent over 10 years in vSphere. Now that Broadcom bundled vSphere 9.0 and you can never buy alone, many alternatives are coming up. Proxmox is outdated. These guys are out of their mind.

But I am seeing a few players. Some are ex-vmware employees. It is very very very interesting to see one of them takeover vSphere in a few years.

Of course, the top enterprise customers are stuck but anyone less than 1000 servers should be an immediate target.

I am very looking forward to see vSphere displacement in action.

19,000 employees were kicked out due to greed and destruction.

.. along with Boeing, GE and other dinosaurs who thought they were cleverer than anyone else and then dropped off a cliff. In my 30 years with the company. We are the next Boeing; too big to fail and then we fall.

I have never ever seen us treat people so badly, treat HC10 like $hit on the bottom of your show an believe India will solve every thing but all they do is sc--w it up and leave the business unit or project to clean it up. If the investors could see the failure, they would be shocked but we always put polish on it.

We as shareholders need to come after the MC when this goes badly and impacts the most important people in the company - the shareholders. For all the investors, you need to watch out for your investment as it tanks

Vote if you agree

does anyone remember the epayments cto who was completely unhinged and not exactly competent. he was truly the beginning of the end

layoffs have occurred at Tyson corporate.

Rumors floating around that 24% already said NO on survey to Edmonton. Lot of others (including me) are playing for time and decided to wait until final decision time of Jan'26. Anyone has insights how the MC is reacting to much steeper than expected rate? I suspect they dont care ... perhaps they will bring in more expats from Houston to fill Senior Management roles.

So the new gimmick for the UR nurses is to hire bedside nurses with no experience in casemanagememt or utilization review, skim over what is required for the job and lie to the individual about what is required. So 16 to 22 reviews, no lunches , a hurried break, stay overtime , listen to a psychotic manager who is only interested in the metrics so she can get a big bonus, hide your head under a rock and pretend you don’t see all the what could be considered frau:;(, work overtime and listen to everyone tell you your burned out in 6 months cause you don’t know how to be productive and organize your time and work for a fraction of what you make at other companies and hospitals.

Accenture is well known for its PIP and easy way to get rid of employees.

Have any personal experience how often and prevalent these are? Describe your PIP experience, location, and if you were able to fight, pass.

Hearing about a bonus in December but cannot find information. If so, will it be paid if laid off before December?

This company is run by mo--ns. I received the Alumni Zone letter in the mail. "A centralized resource for former colleagues".....HELLO?! Im still employed by you!

Scheduling 10 hour shifts on Blk Friday weekend. Seriously?

This week my new boss brought me behind the current to help untangle reorg chaos. He is new in role, so totally lost, and wanted my help on work flows, etc. Long story short, they eliminated multiple jobs with zero plan/guidance as how those responsibilities should be done. When I asked “what’s leaderships guidance?” The response was hand waving about centralization. When I ask what the skills/capacity are of the centralized team, more hand waving. It was then suggested, as a high performer, they’d like me to take on responsibilities of one or more of these roles. Here i pushed back, noting: 1) this was not what I applied for; 2) they dropped my role a psg, 1 below my current psg, and the new role would be a psg above the old role - so unless they adjust the psg, im not doing anything more (because what’s my incentive). I also suggested we needed better guidance from whomever established the new org design to understand what’s intended, and it was made clear to me there was no intentional design here, just a concept they want to make so. The lack of leadership from LT is appalling. And, I don’t see a way out.

But it got me thinking if it’s this much a cluster fu-k in my little corner, the rest of the biz must be as bad or worse. So let’s hear it! What’a broken in your corner of this clusterfu-k?

this isn't a complicated story

leadership pumps up the numbers with ethically challenged accounting

eventually there are no more tricks left in the bag

leadership parachutes out with inflated equity

new leadership "comes clean" and gets a ton of equity at deflated prices

everyone wins, except the dedicated employees

The ones you fire and hire back is a joke. Such a game you play with your financials so the owners get paid on the backs of the Staples slaves. And you wonder why the ones come back in the first place, it’s not for the great culture.

I’ve been laid off twice in the past 10 years. The first time hit me hard after giving 18 years to one company and routinely working 10-14 hour days. I learned loyalty can vanish in an instant. Now I stick to doing my work and nothing extra. Jobs can disappear anytime, and most companies couldn’t care less about their employees.

Hopefully SF is considering de-mutualizing in efforts to remain a force in the industry. Not to mention an IPO and/or being purchased by another stock company could be both beneficial for current and future employees… as well as attracting and retaining top talent.

The Clark County School District sent staff an email on Friday regarding recent layoffs. he district said budget revisions happened after lower-than-expected enrollment numbers this fall. This impacted support professionals, licensed educators, and school administrators.

https://www.8newsnow.com/news/ccsd-staff-impacted-by-layoffs-after-enrollment-decline/

Not just within the company but outside as well. I guess word spreads fast when you're having cuts every two weeks. No wonder we can’t get any good candidates anymore. Good for them, su-ks for us.

I was laid off a few months after getting both from my last job. I was convinced I was safe, and I was not. I just thought people should know this, because I’m guessing this is true everywhere.

https://techrights.org/n/2025/11/08/IBM_Layoffs_Not_Done_Terminations_of_Staff_in_India_Brazil_and_.shtml

it’s freaking Friday!!! How come???

Barclays GTIS layoffs occurred on 11/5 in Whippany,NJ. I'm not entirely sure how many Collegues were impacted but a Network team engaged working on the same project was severely downsized.

It seems like the Barclays grim reaper trims staff every year despite the financial state of the Bank which reported very strong 3Q25 earnings this week.

As always wish those effected much success in quickly landing another professional position to their liking.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-work-use-performance-reviews-1e8975df?mod=hp_lead_pos7

For those of you too cheap to pay the buck a week:

Julie Sweet, the chief executive of consulting giant Accenture ACN 1.83%increase; green up pointing triangle, recently delivered some tough news: Accenture is “exiting” employees who aren’t getting the hang of using AI at work.

The firm has trained about 70% of its roughly 779,000 employees in generative artificial-intelligence fundamentals, she told investors. But employees for whom “reskilling, based on our experience, is not a viable path” will be shown the door, Sweet said.

Rank-and-file employees across corporate America have grown worried over the past few years about being replaced by AI. Something else is happening now: AI is costing workers their jobs if their bosses believe they aren’t embracing the technology fast enough.

From professional-services firms to technology companies, employers are pushing their staffs to learn generative AI and integrate programs like ChatGPT, Gemini or customized company-specific tools into their work. They’re sometimes using sticks rather than carrots. Anyone deemed untrainable or seen as dragging their feet risks being weeded out of hiring processes, marked down in performance reviews or laid off.

Companies are putting their workers on notice about their AI skills amid a wave of white-collar job cuts. Amazon.com announced layoffs last week that affected roughly 14,000 jobs, while Target recently shed 1,800 corporate roles. International Business Machines has also disclosed thousands of cuts. Executives at Amazon and IBM have tied workforce cuts to the technology in statements this year.

Julie Sweet, CEO and Chair of Accenture, speaking at CES 2025 in Las Vegas.
Accenture CEO Julie Sweet says the company is “exiting” employees who aren’t getting the hang of using AI. Overall, the company expects to increase head count in the 2026 fiscal year. Steve Marcus/Reuters
Some companies are training people in how to use the tools—but leaving it up to them to figure out what to use them for. There are countless possibilities for how to deploy AI. Some businesses have required training classes or set up help desks to coach employees on how to incorporate AI into their work. Others are putting the onus on staff to think creatively about how to make money or save time with the tech.

That can prompt exciting innovations—or it may come at the expense of getting work done. Or both.

At enterprise-software company IgniteTech, leaders required staff last year to devote 20% of their workweek to experimenting with AI. On one such “AI Monday,” staff brainstormed ways to speed up processes like automating responding to customer-service tickets. Employees also had to share on Slack and X what they were learning about AI.

CEO Eric Vaughan said that employees self-assessed their AI usage and, afterward, the company used ChatGPT to rank the results. After a human review, IgniteTech cut the lowest-scoring performers.

“By their own admission, they’re in the basement,” he said. “So now they have to leave.”

It wasn’t easy: Vaughan recalls speaking with his wife over that time about the changes, feeling “terrible.” But he said he felt AI was an existential threat, and that if IgniteTech didn’t transform, the company would die. One tough exit was the chief product officer, who had been with the company for years. He and others were model, productive employees historically but were resisting the AI mandate, said Vaughan, who also leads GFI Software and Khoros.

Eric Vaughan, CEO of IgniteTech, speaking at the FT AI Summit.
IgniteTech CEO Eric Vaughan required staff last year to devote 20% of their workweek to experimenting with AI. Ghelani Studios
Greg Coyle, that executive, said he had bought into AI’s potential to improve IgniteTech’s products and add new capabilities. But he took issue with the nature of the widespread cuts, particularly because the technology is in such an early stage.

“Doing this rapid culling of your workforce, it’s very risky,” he said. “If your AI plan doesn’t work out the way you expected it to, it’s a huge risk for the business.”

After a round of cuts, Coyle said he pushed back against an AI mandate in late 2023 in an executive meeting. He said he felt the company wasn’t working strategically as it pushed out staff. A few months later, he said, he was fired.

AI, Coyle said, is “coming whether we like it or not. You either get on board or you get left behind.” But, he added, “I don’t believe that you take this brute force, across-the-board approach to AI in the business.”

Vaughan said the company has since hired AI specialists to replace the laid-off staff. Accenture has said that it expects to increase headcount this fiscal year.

At workforces large and small, plenty of workers are hesitant to adopt AI, fearful that widespread adoption will innovate them out of a job. They also doubt the technology can do the job as well as they can.

Share of responses from U.S. workers who don't use AI tools when asked to select the main reason why not

A recent Gallup survey found that more than 40% of U.S. workers who don’t use AI say the main reason is they don’t believe it can help their work. A smaller share, 11%, said their primary driver was that they did not want to change how they worked. While AI adoption has grown in the past year, working Americans are about three times as likely to say they aren’t prepared at all for AI as opposed to “very prepared,” Gallup found.

Many employees, even when exposed to AI tools that companies spend a lot on, aren’t biting. When researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reviewed more than 300 AI initiatives, they found only 5% were achieving quantifiable value. Employees flock to tools like ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot for their ease of use, but don’t often adopt other software.

A big impediment, the researchers found, is that many of those tools aren’t yet programmed to learn from users’ past interactions. That makes approaching a human colleague a better option for complex work. The best return on investment, the researchers found, has often been on back-office functions.

Prioritizing AI adopters
Companies are finding other ways to push staff to integrate AI into their work.

At McKinsey, analytic problem solving is at the heart of what consultants do. When that skill is measured in future performance reviews, consultants will be evaluated on how they make decisions with AI. Now, in assigning staff to some client projects, McKinsey gives priority to employees who are trained in AI, said Kate Smaje, a senior partner and global leader of technology and AI.

People in KPMG’s human-resources division are assessed on how well they collaborate with AI in their wider evaluations, the firm’s head of people said.

PwC is requiring AI training for its newest hires. It kicked off a nine-piece pilot curriculum for new-graduate associate hires in October, including lessons on “prompting with purpose,” designing workflows that include AI and instruction on how to use the tools responsibly.

And at a fall PwC all-partner meeting with thousands of attendees, working with the technology was part of the agenda. The multimillion dollar investment in AI training “will absolutely pay off,” said Margaret Burke, the firm’s head of recruiting and learning and development.

At Concentrix, a customer-service outsourcing company with more than 400,000 staff, bosses recently realized low-performing developers weren’t using AI.

“You find out those people are refusing to adjust,” said Ryan Peterson, Concentrix’s chief product officer.

Concentrix hired Peterson from Amazon in 2024 with a mandate to find ways to incorporate AI across the company. Its attorneys now use AI to redline new versions of contracts. The technology flags clauses that the company would never agree to in negotiations—like accepting unlimited liability, Peterson said. These efficiencies mean that Concentrix was able to redeploy 10 attorneys to higher-value negotiation work and litigation management.

Purchasing teams use the technology to compare requests for proposals, and marketing teams now use it to format and template emails, he said.

Concentrix’s CEO said in a June earnings call that he doesn’t foresee a “massive decrease” in employment, though he noted that declining head count is a possibility.

‘AI will, not just skill’
Multiverse, an education-tech company in London, states that its mission is to advance AI adoption. Each quarter, it awards an employee who has come up with the best uses for AI 10,000 pounds, or about $13,000. Finalists this quarter include the creator of a paperwork automation system that cut a 30-minute task to five minutes and someone who made a sales aide that creates a customized briefing based on publicly available information.

Job applicants at Multiverse are asked in interviews how they use AI in their lives, and in one assignment, prospective hires write prompts to complete certain tasks, said Libby Dangoor, who oversees the company’s human resources and AI among other areas. If applicants are skeptical of AI, it would be picked up in the application process, she said.

“We have to hire for AI will, not just skill,” she said.

LinkedIn job postings requiring AI literacy skills have expanded by 70% in the 12 months ended in July, according to the site.

Annie Hamburgen hiking in Torres Del Paine, Chile.
When Annie Hamburgen began a job search after an extended trip to South America this year, prospective employers kept asking her about AI. Annie Hamburgen
Annie Hamburgen, 28, of Incline Village, Nev., left her marketing job in March to travel in South America. When she came back and began looking for new work this summer, prospective employers kept asking her about AI. “I’ve been trying to demonstrate my openness to learning while making it clear that I’m not going to blindly type things in and accept whatever result comes out,” she said.

Hamburgen recently got hired for a role leading integrated marketing and starts on Monday. In conversations with her future boss, it’s been clear that she should be using AI to synthesize information. A common refrain: “Type it into Grok!”

For many years getting paged out to P1/P2 even P3 warrooms outside of work hours in the evenings, overnights, at movies, at dinner, getting groceries, at the gym, anywhere you go your phone would constantly go off. Not to mention the contanst group chats for work to respond to. All for no extra pay, layed off 1 year ago and no make way more money, work only 40 hours a week M-F. Get out while you can, they don't care about customers, definitely not employees, only the bottom line and the good ol boys at the top. Find a private company to work for.

I'm sure there's some logic behind getting rid of the best performer on our team, but I sure as he-l can't figure it out. I guess that's why those on top are paid the big bucks. /sarcasm

Anyone who was RA'd still abiding by the RTO 3 day mandatory badging in?

I have come to the belief that the packages going forward are going to be significantly smaller if at all. From the grapevine i hear folks just waiting. Tell us we can leave with a half package and watch how many throw in the towel. No mas! No mas!

Is it over? How many people were hit? Which areas? Anything?

It looks like no layoffs have been announced today, as the new pay period begins so I guess two more weeks of uncertainty and then we can finally know our fate.

Has anybody been pulled out of service for EEO. What takes place and what hoops do you have to jump through. Or are you looking for a new job?

When is Verizon India likely to lay off its employees?

Customer service and technology employees differ significantly from shopfloor workers, rendering the principles of Scientific Management and productivity gains through motion studies irrelevant and ineffective in these roles.
However, Truist, as a service-oriented company, places undue emphasis on the Sapience tool to measure productivity. While this highlights Sapience’s success in marketing and selling its productivity tool to large corporations, it raises concerns about its appropriateness for evaluating service and technology roles.

This company is ki-ling my mental. The inconsistencies between LOBs, multiple booking, originating, and servicing systems for a single loan, lack of accountability for not adhering to policy (changing rules, testing methodology vs behaviors) to manage results, constant turnover, not uploading documents in a timely manner, 1 million conflicting procedures, job aids, and department emails, broken and outdated links, lack of full integration of systems and procedures. I know all of us are waiting for an employee friendly job market so that we can escape chaos.

Guess who didn’t make the list?

https://www.forbes.com/lists/best-employers-women/