Thread regarding Verizon Communications Inc. layoffs

DEI rollout 2021… subscribers leave 2021.. stock
Price tanks 2021.. CEO removes all directs and hires DEI Canadian Women only to remove 6 months later.. CEO gets stock awards.

This is in Vz Board for not holding CEO accountable.. this is on Board

That's the way to resurrect your April post OP!

@2tj not a brand issue its an execution issue and Vz does not have a strong Executive Team and DEI has polluted company.

All of the posts I read are extremely accurate. Being a 40+ employee two things stand out: 1. Executive Team comprised of European Team unappreciative of the Ma Bell legacy heritage and laser focus on Customer 2. DEI being embedded in Executive and Mid Level Management will harm the company next 5 years. Thats assuming new CEO that is results focus and getting employees back in the office 5 days per week in 2025. If not it’s a 10 yr project.

@k1 The issue at Verizon is the Board. Verizon was top heavy with out of tiuch European Leadership running a company that is 90% USA

Past 5 years saw a negative stock return from 60’s to high 30’s. Spent 40 years in Vz and without question the woke focus on leadership was the cause for failure. The Board needs to be held accountable. To allow leadership all be removed but CEO just highlights dysfunction. The shame is the heritage of Verizon was Engineering and Performance. The midlevel management now retail store employees with pronouns.

Verizon desperately needs brand reconstruction and monetization of 5G/home broadband before T-Mobile and cable companies crush them further.
A safe operationalist like Sampath would just delay the reckoning. They need a marketer and builder, not a caretaker.

Culture, are you out of your fn mind. A culture of backstabbing people that think their importance level is based on the info they hoard. And will kick you in the tiny twos in a heartbeat if it would make them look better. Maybe, review the definition before touting.

Hans Vestberg was sold to Verizon’s board as a transformational leader. A “maverick” CEO. The reality?

A 5G evangelist who oversaw:
• 289,000 postpaid subscriber losses in Q1 2025 alone
• Bloated investment in underperforming ventures (BlueJeans, 5G Home)
• Executive pay ($24M in 2023) that outpaced shareholder value
• Strategic stagnation while T-Mobile outmaneuvered Verizon at every turn

Leadership is about results, not optics. “Maverick” doesn’t excuse decline — it explains boardroom denial.

It’s time to stop romanticizing underperformance.

luv the culture?
Bawaaaaaaa....sure if you like people lying to your face every moment of the day, I guess you'd be super happy.

Re: "$20B acquisition of Frontier’s fiber footprint."

You must mean Repurchasing Frontier's fiber footprint for more than we sold it to them for.

Hans Vestberg’s latest announcement touts price locks, free phones, and bundled streaming. On the surface, it’s a win for consumers. But beneath the marketing polish lies a more sobering reality.

Verizon is quietly shedding thousands of jobs—particularly in legacy divisions—while realigning resources to support its $20B acquisition of Frontier’s fiber footprint. It’s classic consolidation: cut costs, inflate margins, and dress it up in consumer-friendly packaging.

This is not a strategy rooted in innovation. It’s a strategy of delay and deflection—designed to hold the line on churn and calm shareholders ahead of Q1 earnings.

The questions we should ask:
• What investments are being made in real network modernization?
• Why are so many seasoned employees being let go while customer-facing promises expand?
• Can you call it transformation when the internal talent pool is shrinking?

Sometimes, what’s left unsaid is more important than what’s posted.

Marathons are as important as the stock price. You all need to be patient. Once Hans improves his health he will then work on the stock price. This is what he learned at his last employer. What worked there must work the same way here.

Wait. Did it?!??

Verizon CEO talks marathons while the company’s bleeding market share, cutting staff, and losing direction. Inspiring? Maybe. Reassuring? Not really.

Look forward all the time,” says Verizon’s CEO. Meanwhile, customers look for better service, employees look for answers, and investors look for growth. Everyone’s looking—just not in the same direction.

Glad Hans is crushing marathons. Now if only Verizon could sprint past dropped calls, slow Fios rollouts, and morale freefall.

Looks like all of the DEI trophy winners and leftovers are not happy with their making.

Garbage in, garbage out, garbage all around! As most folks know, DEI is just a backdoor to bring socialism into the country and separate you from what you own. If you own a home you are not as transportable for the big companies to move you around for maximum tax benefits and the lowest cost of labor. If we give everyone a trophy then nothing makes you special to make you worth more than they are paying you or your coworkers.

Average is what they are after and exceptional is their enemy. This is why there is soon to be, was an invisible and all of the other prepay bad ideas thought up by Hans and his homies who thought that socializing the network was the best way forward. So the once fabled Network was tarted out to all of the cable companies far and wide and prepaid bottom feeders. It used to be a joke in finance regarding all of the perpetual 'missing prepaid phone cards and in spite of technology, life has not improved much since then.

The best thing about to happen to this company is the end of DEI and the focus of the FCC on what has been happening since Blackrock put their boy in the drivers seat and ushered in prepaid and the 5G drag on capital and earnings.

IT leadership os pretty bad qith the indian mafia, but Miami IT is Non competent. Amd lesd by 20+ year tenured grandpas

As long as the CEO of the company don’t hold himself accountable for no growth, he can’t hold anyone accountable. Layoffs and cost cutting is the only way to go. Very utility like environment.

Their competition are eating their lunch. You wait to hear Q1 results.

at least two of the design leaders i've had the displeasure of working with have been hostile, aggressive, retaliatory, and so emotionally unregulated to the point of likely being clinically bipolar. terrible company! terrible leadership! one of the worst places i have ever worked! never again!

this company has been going down ever since lwell mc'dou--e was CEO,now we have the sweedish Meathead running the show,lord help us..

It's an absent leadership. You'll see more of them doing conferences and speeches outside the company, versus inside talking to employees. When they do make an appearance, it's to spend as little time as possible with the employees. Fly in, talk, then fly out. Gone are the days for off site conferences and actual meet and greets. Any skip level is both selective and limited.... all to check a box.

Everything is just to get by, spend as little money and time on or with the employees. There is no employee engagement.

Everything is virtual, self-service, or cut in the name of expense. Change is forced by market conditions not good will.

There are some that are good leaders, but far outnumbered by the bad ones.

Speaking of cfo, the “cfo” of VGS has a LinkedIn description that says supporting comminications. Not communications. Comminications. A blatant spelling error that would result in a thrown out resume for any entry level job. World class at its finest.

Finance used to be world class but now is clown class! Everybody has all sorts of letters and certifications but no financial common sense. The stock is down along with the net adds, cutomer care and quality of service.

The company's finance team used to be on presidents of both parties, economic advisors call lists. One former Finance directors was awarded Business Week Economist of the Year for more than 10-years running.

The company has not consistently earned its cost of capital for years as evidenced by the stock price. The company needs a real CFO with his own team to clean house.

Finance and Investor Relations are amateur hour now. It is what it is.

'I loved working at Verizon. I believed in the mission, the people, and what we could build. But it’s painful to watch what the company has become—not because of a lack of resources, but because of a total failure of leadership and vision.'

Many managers don't know what their employees do and many actually tell their employees they don't know what exactly their employees do, but pushing 'shareholder values' as a priority and just putting out fires is all they know. Clueless leading the clueless.

Customer network experience is suffering as not enough resources to work actual service impacting issues as every group is spread thin - all to ensure shareholder value!

Finance is world class and does nothing but valuable work. If you have a reorg of moving 1 headcount from Consumer to VGS for example, finance thought leaders at VP level task their teams to spend time getting alignment to restate budget, make up historical restatements, and populate numerous checklists for overlapping teams between shadow finance, finance finance, fpas, systems, operations and transformation teams to facilitate the transfer of 1 headcount. It can easily take 25+ people to initiate and review the transfer of 1 headcount. Money well spent and brilliant use of time and resources per the VP! Art of the possible

Speaking of finance, ever since Ellis left, Hans could not get anyone to come work for him. Such a bad reputation he has. Having to beg the guy to stick around who was an interim CFO itself must be humiliating for Hans. Finance now is a hatchet machine run by folks who wait for their next pay check. ZBB, Fit to Win, Business Excellence, QMS, Process Excellence, Transformation, all were so unpopular that NO ONE wants to start another initiative. It is better to just wait and see rather than do anything.

Leadership SU-KS

I loved working at Verizon. I believed in the mission, the people, and what we could build. But it’s painful to watch what the company has become—not because of a lack of resources, but because of a total failure of leadership and vision.

Verizon is packed with enterprise tools:
PeopleSoft for HR and planning.
Anaplan for financial modeling.
Looker for analytics.
Klik for dashboard reporting.
SAP HANA as a powerful backend ERP platform.

But all of it is disconnected, misused, or under-leveraged. Instead of enabling insight, these systems have become a way to justify decisions already made. Data is cherry-picked. Dashboards are curated. KPIs shift depending on what the latest narrative requires.

Meanwhile, teams are greenlit for major initiatives with no long-term roadmap, only to have projects scrapped midway—millions wasted, and employees left frustrated and demoralized. Finance has gone from being a steward of value to a support function for spin.

This is not a tech problem. It’s not a resourcing problem. It’s a leadership problem.

You can’t cut your way to relevance. You can’t automate your way out of confusion. And you can’t fake strategy with executive dashboards and press releases.

Verizon doesn’t need more systems.
It needs vision, cohesion, and conviction.

Not sure what part of culture you “love” but our culture is of no-change and do-nothing. Leadership is about corporate jet flights and slides and 3rd party engagements that yield nothing.

DEI and ESG has ki-led this company.

Only leadership trait that is in demand is submit to the CEO and applaud when he shows his mood chart that he has been keeping for years. How about showing the chart where you showed where we shall be in market cap 4 years ago. Apparently that was deleted. Sick!

This fish rots from its head. CEOs set the culture and this culture is about fire the people so you have no one who remembers you made stuff up from thin air!

All good comments but seeing a competitor do an almost 10x on Total Shareholder Return seems to indicate that there is fundamentally something broken at VZ. Hans knows about telecom as much as Sam knows about Human Resources. They both su-k at their job. Better HR leader carefully quit in a year after she saw Hans for who he is, worthless con from EU to wreck US company. We should impose 2000% tariff on Sweden I say

This started in 2014, all the reorgs/acquisitions (& subsequent exits) still couldn’t change the “d—mb pipe” reality. VZ has tried to move up the stack, but time & time again it fell flat on its face due to poor execution and lack of vision (I.e. leadership). The Frontier acquisition shows VZ has given up on idea of growing vertically, but simply expanding market share and squeeze on efficiency. Bottom line, unless you’re working on cost-saving projects, more layoffs are coming.

Hans has said it himself in interviews that Verizon is not a growth company. The business is to keep the network running and get more people on it. There are no hot products or services driving growth. Verizon missed the boat on AI, and now the public cloud providers will be putting more at the edge and in the devices such that the network becomes the big d-mb pipe it always was and has been. There is the development of network APIs so these clients can manage their own network inside Verizon and reduce internal network engineers and managed services technicians.

A couple of comments - First, the "grass is always greener". People seem to think that other companies are so much better than VZ, but as someone who has worked for many different large and small companies, it's like ex-boyfriends/girlfriends -- there were great and lousy things about each one, different but still a mixed bag. Moving on from VZ will bring you both better and worse experiences at your next job. Second, the promise of 5G. All the telcos had to spend $$$ to invest in 5G, but it has so far not delivered on its hype. We're getting our butt kicked by TMo, but they're just better at marketing than we are. Management made decisions based upon what the experts predicted and it didn't come to pass, so now we (like our competitors) are scrambling and cutting wherever we can cut.

Highly recommend focusing on the good. I know it’s tough when day to day there can be a lot of useless work and poor direction. But it’s so much better than most anywhere else out there for pay and opportunity through retirement. I intensely wish I had appreciated it. I wish my leadership had helped me deal with stress better but the work never stopped piling on. Power through cause the alternative of leaving feels like death with no hope. Especially in this economy.

When your leadership include mo--ns like Shankar Sam and Hans, not to mention Kyle and Joe - it is a clown titanic. Shame on those who stay on board. Get out while you can.

Pay check is definitely good but make sure but so was titanic ride until it was a bad deal.

Vteamer beware!

Is Hans even still around? Has anyone seen him in 2 months?

Run, or likely get laid off in the next round.

I agree with the initial post. It trickles down to the Senior Manager’s and the Supervisors. It’s comical in a way, as the Supervisor’s are pushing the front line to push and work hard as we are the “best”. Have they seen T-Mobile stock price and market share? It’s the blind leading the blind. I’m disappointed to see this once really great company go down to the level we are at now. We have 0 leadership in the company, and we used to bank on World Class Customer Service. That is GONE. I’m ready to go…

still getting paid, why complain ?