The thing that irks me most about working at ETS is that there is this purported mission of fairness and equity, but they don't even pretend like it applies to employees. For instance, there was a large round of layoffs recently, and leadership is already talking about having to hire new people because there are not enough staff for next year's projects. This suggests to me that they will not even consider your role before eliminating your position. Another thing is that that leadership constantly refers to this fabled "culture" that needs to be "re-energized", but their vision of culture hasn't been articulated beyond ending fully remote work and is so unpopular that it has to be imposed on staff. The leadership seems to believe that I will be re-energized by driving an hour each way in New Jersey traffic to the middle-of-nowhere campus to look at spreadsheets from a cubicle. I get the impression that the executives spend a lot of time in meetings and can not see past how they experience work themselves. An additional element of unfairness and inequity related to this specific example is that a number of staff do not live within commuting distance and will continue to be remote, so it is entirely plausible that I may be driving in to work some day soon in order to collaborate with a fully remote team. Leadership does not care at all about this, and when the issue was raised in a recent townhall event, the CEO laughed, refused to even address it, and just repeated some overly-rehearsed line about "culture". The lack of transparency and doublespeak from the executives also makes this job seem very unfair. I already mentioned the "re-energizing the culture" bit. Another example of this relates to the "summer hours" that ETS used to have, in which staff could finish work at 2pm on Fridays from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Well, this was recently cut, so now it is from July 7 to Memorial Day, but instead of acknowledging its reduction, it was hailed as something being "maintained." I thought this was pretty unfair because it does not present information about my job in a clear, straightforward way and because no rationale for the reduction was explained. Ironically, many of my colleagues and I used these summer hours in the past to informally socialize after work. The CEO has started using the term "the new normal" to refer to this set of changes when addressing the entire organization, which I find really disgusting and equable, as this was the term used to describe how life had changed once the pandemic started. It triggers an emotional response in me because it brings back memories of my loved ones passing away, social isolation, and fear. For privileged millionaires like ETS executives, the pandemic was perhaps less impactful on their lives; these words do not hold the same weight to them, so they think it is okay to ignorantly use them when rolling out their unpopular policies. Imagine having something you don't want to do be described using the buzzword that was previously used to describe a traumatic period your life! I could go on, but these are the things that bother me the most lately.
