Over the past five years, the environment has shifted dramatically. During the pandemic, remote work was handled well, and productivity remained high. However, everything changed in mid-2023 when leadership introduced return-to-office (RTO) mandates—despite having previously assured employees that remote work would continue. This was then followed with an announcement of reduce in workforce plans.
The RTO policy feels more like a tool for attrition than an effort to improve collaboration. Exceptions were promised but rarely granted. Leadership seems to hope that by forcing people back to the office, employees will quit on their own. Layoffs came next and now RTO tracking/RTO 5 days threats, with further “expense actions” still looming. Morale has plummeted, and it feels like leadership has deliberately fostered a toxic environment to push people out without having to pay severance.
The company’s slogans are empty and deceptive. The phrase “through the clients’ eyes” seems like it is more about misleading clients—showing them what the firm wants them to see—until regulators expose the truth. The firm’s recent $200 million fine (directly related to misleading clients) and lawsuits around the deceptive cash sweep program are proof that what clients see does not align with what’s really going on behind the scenes.
There’s also “The Power of One.” slogan. While it sounds empowering, it also works as an authoritarian motto—a way to enforce control and diminish dissent. There’s no room for the thoughts or opinions of anyone outside the highest-paid leaders, whose decisions seem disconnected from the reality of average employees’ experiences.
It’s especially hard to swallow the outgoing CEO’s claim (at a recent town hall) that his decisions are driven by “love” when his total compensation is close to 300 times the average employee salary. If his love is real, it must be a love of money and power, not people.
I understand that Schwab is a profit-driven institution so perhaps it’s naive to expect genuine care from leadership. At the end of the day “leadership” is driven by increasing the stock $ for the shareholders and they are some of the biggest shareholders.
It’s the pretending to care about employees and clients while undermining morale and misleading clients—that makes Schwab feel like a bad place to work (for some of us).”