Here is an opinion of a blue employee here. I have read many of the issues that green employees are facing and some, if not most of them are shared by blue employees as well. The funny part is that you have not even seen the worst of it yet. For example, I saw a post regarding merit increases and bonuses and laughed. Do you know that most employees fall into a meet category and will typically just receive a basic cost of living increase? Now the trolls may say “well you should just work harder to achieve the higher rating” and my answer to that is that it is all political and has nothing to do with your work ethic. You could work 100 hours week and be recognized by your peers and if leadership does not like you, it simply won’t matter, and leadership will not like you if challenge them or ask any questions. They simply want to surround themselves with yes men/women. This year I suspect that the merit increases, and bonuses will be slightly higher as leadership knows that attrition is through the roof, and they will have to reduce what can be delivered by CD1. What you likely do not realize about Schwab is that we will meet the CD1 deadline and celebrate the achievement. What gets delivered and how it functions however, is a different story entirely. The what will likely be held together by duct tape and will force lower level developers to work even more hours to keep the system up and running. At Schwab it is all about perception and not actual accomplishments.
When Schwab acquired TD Ameritrade, I was excited as I had heard that they really focused on employee engagement and put the employees first. The hope was that this thinking would transfer over to Schwab, and we would work on creating a more engaging environment, and from what I have seen nothing has changed. I do believe that Walt wants an environment of employee engagement however, the issue is that message gets heavily watered down by the time it reaches the lower executive levels. Engagement to most groups is to try and pump-up employees just before the survey goes out and after the deadline it is back to business as usual. The group could have some of the lowest engagement scores in the company and you will see nothing change. If executive leadership really wanted to make engagement a priority, they could by simply changing the engagement survey to a random one that the vendor controls which would occur throughout the year and not just once a year. They would also allow for write in answers to any scores that are low and allow the employee to express their concerns. This would force lower-level leadership to take engagement more seriously. In addition, if engagement scores are low, leadership should be held accountable and put on an action plan to increase their scores.
I am personally hoping that come bonus time there is a mass exodus simply because it will cause Schwab executive leadership to go into a panic mode and realize that the status quo will no longer work. The hope is that it will force leadership to take employee engagement seriously and make significant changes to weed out poor leadership.