Culture has become more toxic over the past year, and while senior leadership proclaims that ‘it’s all about the people’, not sure which people they are referring to. As more outsourcing occurs, the remaining internal associates are required to take culture sensitivity training to better understand how to interact with offshore colleagues. While I have no objection to, and actually enjoy the opportunity to learn about other cultures, it seems shortsighted to not request offshore vendor partners to undergo the same training to promote synergistic working relationships. The investment in this training has been and continues to be profound.
Speaking of people, rather than retaining a high-performing contractor who can navigate our convoluted systems, processes and politics for a few weeks between project end and start, senior leadership prefers the approach of laying off the contractor; the onboarding of a new contractor requires more effort and is ultimately more costly in training and ramp up time.
As noted in another review, the most basic of processes have become so overladen that any opportunity to deliver value is lost in red tape. The lack of alignment on process has created a wild, Wild West showdown, wherein whomever has the loudest voice asserts their will and it goes unchecked. But don’t expect that the same process will be followed the next time around.
Strong-willed stakeholders regularly increase project scope demanding features that overcomplicate delivery for limited edge cases. In their defense, they do this out of fear (based on lived experience) they will be indefinitely stuck with manual workarounds, at the mercy of the cumbersome funding process to get a project to remediate the technical debt.
We have grand ideas of how to modernize the technology but those ideas are lost in the dysfunctional implementation process. We continue to engage vendor partners who over promise and under deliver. We continue to favor cost savings over quality. We continue to invest in legacy technology over innovation. We continue to demand over-customization of software to accommodate broken business practices over adapting to out-of-the-box solutions and revising process to match the best-in-class solution.
Leadership is always touting training programs for aspiring leaders but yet no one is allowed access to them due to financial constraints.
All that glitters is not gold. The company is so proud of its new headquarters. Albeit the modern facility is beautiful on the outside but empty on the inside (literally and figuratively). Morale is low, but to encourage high employee satisfaction survey ratings (which are part of the compensation for leaders), messaging and perks are doled out close to annual survey time. The company does not want honest feedback, and if you offer it, there will be endless questioning and strategic planning to overcome the negative perceptions. It’s all a facade and a distraction. Those who have been around for a few years have learned to play the game and rate everything highly in order to spare themselves the badgering. Now they have resorted to having a separate survey where they say they truly want honest feedback. These survey results will not impact the ‘great place to work’ reputation, but will result in more badgering and wasted time putting action plans into place for the sole purpose of checking it off the list.
