I don't foresee anything changing for the better here. It was to be expected that a series of wrong moves by the leadership would cause such a toxic atmosphere and bad company culture. What are our highly compensated leaders doing now to improve the culture? Nothing it seems to me. It doesn't seem to worry them at all.
6 replies (most recent on top)
Only way to improve culture and morale is show Franky boy the door and all his other a$$ kissing lackies. PLaw for sure needs to be second in line.
Top down management, like the RTO policy, is antiquated at best and won't move a company forward in this day and age. Pick up any book on modern management and it will tell you that building trust and empowering employees takes a company much further than "old school" top down methods.
@pyi+1kvJnvNw, I know your question was rhetorical, but for the record, the issue with the company's RTO approach (in my opinion) is essentially twofold:
- Employees who had been hired by Fiserv (before the FD takeover) as remote workers, and had been working remote for up to a decade or more, were unceremoniously forced into offices and required to relocate if a go-forward office was not close to them.
- The CEO is dictating a company-wide RTO policy, instead of letting managers or even SVPs determine the best policies for their respective teams.
There are plenty of other issues with the company's RTO policy, of course, but these two issues are most prominent in my mind.
What is the issue with a very reasonable approach to rto, such as the "majority", which is Fiserv's policy???
The RIFs will continue until the culture improves...or conforms to the FB view of the world. Those who can will go...there is no option to change from within, the MC is locked in active or passive alignment with FB. Making it all a very simple choice for associates. Give the devil his due, he knows how to control top down. Accept it and you can do just fine here. But for anyone who aspires to more, it's toxic. Remove the emotion from the equation and make a calm business like decision to remove yourself. There are many many options out there, it may take time to find the right one, but a little self-determination goes a long way. Some (senior management) folks have golden handcuffs and will have to wrestle with the tradeoffs. Mourning what was lost won't help anyone.
I think one potential way to improve the culture at the company would be to return some amount of decision-making power back to managers and VPs, particularly around people-focused decisions and policies.
I know that in my particular unit within Fiserv, my direct manager, their manager, and our SVP were all fantastic people who genuinely cared about their employees and wanted to give them more leeway and freedom. However, due to the C-suite ruling with a heavy hand—dictating every little detail and micromanaging from above—my unit's managers and leaders were mostly powerless to improve the quality of life for their employees. I think a simple way to improve employee satisfaction and morale, at least for units with good managers, would be to let them self-govern with regards to things like WFH/RTO policies, working methodologies, etc. No one knows a team's needs better than the manager of each team, so it makes little sense for the CEO to be dictating policies around the day-to-day minutiae of employees' work lives. Such decisions would be better left to managers, who are ostensibly there for exactly that purpose.