#corporateculture

Everyone quit your crying 😢 about RTO and get back to the office five days a week. If the complaints don’t stop you will required to work seven days a week on 12 hour shifts. Oh and no holidays off either!

Welcome to corporate America 🇺🇸!

If you put on your blinder and look down and support the company like they’re your own flesh and blood, you’ll do well. But at what cost?

Not sure if this is company wide or just certain departments, but it looks like they’re going to start cracking down on hours in office for salaried employees. Last month a girl on a neighboring team was placed on “administrative leave” as she was being investigated for hours spent in office. Then earlier today, a guy on my team received an email titled “Corporate Investigation - RTO”, but he was able to come back to his desk and continue his day. He said he’ll talk to me off campus about the meeting.

Is this mainly focused on the groups in the “corporate functions” overhead org or all of the embedded functions in the businesses as well? Been hearing the overhead groups already found out last week or week prior not sure about the others.

Here are some new words for our friends at Corporate CommsGPT:

• Macroeconomic atmospheric turbulence
• Strategic velocity dampening
• Opportunity realization drag coefficients
• Enterprise momentum asymmetry
• Dynamic value-capture friction
• Market digestion oscillations
• Revenue-adjacent gravitational forces
• Go-to-market viscosity

Feel free to add your own.

If you think Shell is messed up…it’s actually a fine running Swiss watch. Enjoy what a near peer is going through…Any time you hear energy transition and BP beyond petroleum…

After 20+ (mostly hellish, but somewhat productive) years at Centene, I had the misfortune of being re-orged under a Sr. VP that had no idea what anyone's background and contributions had been over the decades, so I and some others were shown the door in layoffs a couple months ago. I came across this article today that lays out perfectly how the last 20 years have been for a lot of us:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/gen-x-doesn-t-want-to-work-and-their-reasons-actually-make-sense/ss-AA1VYmbT?ocid=msedgntp&pc=W069&cvid=6a1dd379fcb443ba814542eb7b86d0fe&ei=107#image=1

Slides 16 (Corporate Culture Prioritizes Appearance Over Measurable Results) and 19 (Performance Reviews Emphasize Arbitrary Metrics Over Actual Contributions) really hit home, especially this from slide 16 - "Elaborate presentations mattered more than project outcomes. Workers who delivered results efficiently got overlooked while colleagues who mastered workplace theater earned promotions."

I have never seen a company waste so much time and money on worthless slide decks that are forgotten immediately after they are delivered. If you totaled all the wasted manpower in terms of the salaries of the people that had to drop everything they were doing to work on a deck for some muckety-muck that was coming to town or wanted an update on something, I would venture it is in the hundreds of millions of dollars in wasted salaries over the life of the company.

Anyway , time to get back to figuring out how I want to spend the rest of my career. I promised myself it would be doing something that provides meaningful, measurable, tangible results, so going back to Centene is off the table.

No time to think…just Go!

Sebastian Page requested that the TRP AI innovation team investigate and draft up a POC for a “humanoid robot” with AI capabilities.
That’s the d-mbest sh-t I’ve ever heard. Isn’t this an investment firm?

At some point, layoffs at SAP stopped being a last resort and started being a standard business tool. Instead of exhausting every other option first, cutting employees is now the main go-to move whenever costs need trimming.

Oracle is reportedly undertaking its largest-ever layoffs. A report on Blind alleges the company exploits loopholes. Internal systems show hybrid workers reclassified as remote. This reclassification aims to avoid the WARN Act's 60-day notice. The post described this action as 'morally bankrupt'.

https://inshorts.com/en/amp_news/oracle-exploiting-loopholes-to-avoid-staff-benefits-amid-its-largest-layoffs--report-1780299406240

I've worked at several companies over the years, and I have never seen anything quite like the culture of secrecy that exists here. Management hoards information, doling out tiny scraps only when absolutely necessary. They don't trust any of us to handle bad news or make decisions, so they treat us like children instead of empowering us to do our jobs well. The result is a workforce that's disengaged, frustrated, and constantly in the dark about where the company is actually headed. It's frustrating, to say the least.

At some point, there needs to be real transparency around bloated administrative layers and whether they are creating proportional value. The people building, selling, supporting, and moving the business deserve a fairer share. Every company is flattening. If Cisco does not do the same, it is only a matter of time before employees, customers, and the market start questioning Cisco’s relevance.

Well said, @cp+1kr4j9r3b.

There has been a noticeable and disappointing shift in leadership culture within the Quality department, moving away from collaborative corporate values and toward an authoritarian, military-style command-and-control structure. A prime example is the expectation for staff to use artificial, forced scripts and mandated pleasantries during casual daily interactions, mimicking a rigid military hierarchy. This level of forced conformity completely invalidates the deep institutional knowledge and dedication of long-tenured employees who have spent years building this company.

Furthermore, the communication style from leadership in this department is deeply unprofessional and counterproductive to a healthy business environment. Meetings are frequently disrupted by leaders bringing aggressive military briefing tactics into the corporate world, cutting people off mid-sentence if they do not receive an immediate, hyper-concise answer. This dismissive behavior shuts down open communication, erodes psychological safety, and shows a blatant lack of respect for the team's expertise. Employees joined a corporation, not the armed forces, and they should not be subjected to this type of combat-zone impatience.

What is most concerning is that upper management has completely failed to address or call out this unacceptable behavior. By allowing these toxic, drill-sergeant leadership tactics to go unchecked within the Quality department, executive leadership is actively damaging employee morale and driving away top talent. This company used to thrive on mutual respect and professional dialogue, but the current lack of oversight and acceptance of rigid, disrespectful behavior makes the workplace culture unsustainable.

My neighbors ask me all the time when did Dell become so toxic? I tell them it's been this way for many years. But lately, it's accelerated because our inept, incompetent, inexperienced, nepotistic leadership clowns started thinking it could replace employees with AI chatbots. All driven by greed. Dell leadership or HR absolutely DOES NOT CARE about employees.

Zebra became very hierarchical at the Director and VP level several years ago. It’s an acute problem now.

Seems to be deep reluctance to cull the herd of ineffective Directors and VPs, or do away with layers.

For a $6 B company Zebra is ridiculously hierarchical and top heavy these days. It didn’t use to be this way.

Part of the issue is that Zebra leadership felt compelled to promote hordes of the best and brightest, and to promote women and minorities to make a declarative statement as an unapologetic liberal leaning and DEI embracing company.

All well and good but look around today.

It is incredibly exhausting to watch the Verizon Corporate playbook unfold this way.
The FCC's approval of Verizon’s $1 billion acquisition of Array Digital Infrastructure’s spectrum licenses highlights a frustrating reality in the telecom industry. Capital investments in assets are prioritized while internal human infrastructure is treated as a disposable expense.
Late 2025 – Early 2026...Under the mandate of "restructuring the expense base," Verizon executed the largest workforce reduction in its history, slashing roughly 15,000 roles (about 15% of its workforce). The cuts heavily targeted non-union management, thinning out deep layers of institutional knowledge and technical leadership.
Then the Frontier acquisition makes the whole scenario even more cynical.
Frontier itself is a patchwork of legacy systems, heavily built out of old Verizon copper and fiber properties (like the FiOS territories Verizon dumped on them a decade ago), alongside various independent local exchange carrier (ILEC) networks. Merging those complex transport layers, legal demand operations, and routing architectures into Verizon’s wireless core is an incredibly complex engineering task.
When a company replaces thousands of veteran technical minds with vendor-managed solutions and automated scripts, they compromise the actual resilience of the backbone. They may own the physical glass in the ground and the spectrum in the air, but they’ve stripped away the very people who possess the diagnostic intuition to keep it running when a major regional routing failure hits.
May 2026...Just months later, the FCC cleared a $1 billion deal for Verizon to absorb spectrum licenses across 618 counties in 19 states.
In the eyes of the executive suite and Wall Street, spending $1 billion on airwaves is viewed as building a "simpler, leaner, and scrappier business." From a purely architectural standpoint, low-band and mid-band spectrum are the lifeblood of network capacity. Executives argue that you can't run a network without the spectrum to back it up, and they are willing to spend billions to keep pace with T-Mobile and AT&T. But the glaring flaw in this philosophy is that spectrum doesn't manage itself.
When a company strips away over 15,000 employees—decades of hands-on expertise, system engineering, and operational continuity—they are betting entirely on automation, vendor solutions, and junior staff to stitch the new infrastructure together. It ignores the reality that the "meat" of a reliable network isn't just the raw megahertz you own; it's the architectural knowledge required to deploy, secure, and maintain it without catastrophic failures.
Squeezing the people who built the system to fund a balance sheet optimization is a short-term strategy that frequently backfires on long-term operational stability. It’s the ultimate corporate paradox - buying up the highway while laying off the engineers who know how to pave it.

Corporate environments today are not the stable, lifelong paths they once claimed to be. So often we see people changing assignments, leaving the company, being put on PIPs, or facing layoffs. Stop repeating corporate talking points “At ExxonMobil, we hire for careers. ”Instead let employees build adaptable skills and navigate change effectively. This brain washing needs to stop

Not to add fuel to the fire on here - but while most people worry about if they will have a job, some higher-ups were listed on this page.

Business as usual for them. Guessing they didn't use AI for the transactions to delight the executives?

https://www.stocktitan.net/sec-filings/VZ/

Groundbreaking stuff! A CEO acknowledging that employees outside the US are also, in fact, employees. And framing the bonus as damage control for American democracy imploding? Absolutely riveting corporate theater!

Thank you, Dr. Goodnight!

The most recent mandatory course on fincrimes included an example of bad things happening when firms operate outside the law - the GS Malaysian corruption scandal that cost GS $600 million to settle. Anyone wanna guess the initials of one of the GS execs implicated. (Google it)

"Now that the latest Colleague Engagement Survey has closed, it is important to reflect on the strategy behind it. Evidence suggests that these 'colleague engagement' tools are increasingly being repurposed as diagnostic filters for layoffs.

• Treat Surveys as Legal Documents: Do not view these as 'safe spaces.' Anything you wrote can and will be used by an algorithm to assess your 'retention value.'

• Identify the Push: When leadership becomes obsessively focused on survey participation rates with multiple VPs and Directors badgering staff for 'opinions', it serves as a critical RED FLAG for an impending organizational 're-alignment,' signaling that they are gathering the necessary paper trail to justify a workforce reduction in the next 8–16 weeks. This predatory use of feedback doesn't just destroy morale; it marks a total collapse of corporate integrity, proving that the company views employee honesty as a liability to be exploited rather than a resource to be valued.

#WorkplaceTransparency #CorporateCulture #EmployeeEngagement #JobSecurity #HRTrends #LeadershipWarning #CorporateIntegrity #TheSurveyIsATrap #LayoffAlert #ToxicWorkplace #RedFlags #ProtectTheWorkforce #WorkplaceRights #EmployeeRights

Do you guys not see what happened when Dan Schulman was installed?

Dan was on the board of Verizon for years. That means he saw the profit loss, the bad decisions, the damage to the company image, the lack of innovation, the failed investments, and the growing disconnect between leadership and the people actually keeping the company alive.

He saw the damage being done to customers too, especially long tenured customers who stayed loyal for years only to watch service, support, and consistency deteriorate while prices continued climbing.

None of this happened overnight.

What happened next was a corporate coup.

The old guard and leaders who could advocate for employees, customers, and the necessity of certain roles were removed. Thousands were laid off. Fear was injected into the workforce. Then a new class of leadership was installed, leadership whose loyalty is upward to the executives who promoted them, not downward to the employees carrying the business.

People who spent years chasing titles like Senior Manager, Director, Senior Director, and VP are not going to risk those positions fighting for workers, customers, or the long term health of the company. Their mission is survival within the system.

Meanwhile experienced talent leaves, morale collapses, customers grow frustrated, and the company keeps pretending it does not understand why performance and public perception continue declining.

Never forget what they did and who they did it to.

This was not some random restructuring. It was calculated, coordinated, and executed with precision.

So that Bill Ackman can make 5 billion instead of 3 and so that do nothing fat cats can get their multi million bonuses.

Anyone else think corporate surveillance has gotten completely out of control?

Badge swipes trackd... VPNs tracked. Teams status tracked. Meetings in Calendar tracked. All emails scanned. Fu--ing Productivity Metrics... AI note takers in meetings nobody ever asked for.

Then leadership wonders why morale is unlived and nobody trusts mgmt anymore.

At this point I just assume every company laptop is basically a monitoring device with some work tools installed on it.

Deloitte mostly copies what we do, adds a few minor changes, and then presents the same work across other projects. They’re also very good at replicating our frameworks and showcasing them to other clients. I’m not sure why Yael Cosset and Jim Clendenen keep supporting hires from Deloitte, but it definitely feels like there’s some kind of Deloitte backchannel benefiting them.

I found Robin Vince’s LinkedIn post last week… fascinating. He calls it a “full circle moment” with his Goldman buddy Lloyd Blankfein, yet it plays like another round of leadership cosplay. It might even be touching if BNY employees weren’t here describing a workplace stitched together with fear, offshoring, and corporate theater. Nothing says “excellence” like inviting a billionaire mentor to discuss humility lessons learned at Goldman while thousands of his BNY employees beg for clarity, stability, or even basic honesty.

Vince praises Blankfein’s lessons on uncertainty and values — meanwhile BNY’s workforce is drowning in ambiguity, morale is on life support, and “risk taking” mostly means gambling with people’s futures.

He talks about embedding values “every day,” yet avoids the very public concerns about layoffs, offshoring, collapsing trust, and a workforce treated like expendable inventory in a never-ending transformation cycle.

The real full circle moment won’t be a photo op with a retired Goldman titan. It’ll be when Vince realizes that inspirational quotes and curated leadership moments don’t fix morale, don’t slow attrition, and don’t rebuild credibility.

Fran faking her compassion and reading her statements tell you all you need to know about how much this C-Suite cares. Her and Mark sit in their posh million dollar homes and talk about cutting travel while they travel the world. The hypocrisy of this group is amazing as they continue to guard their stock price and protect their multi-million dollar payouts.

The only reason we are sponsoring them is because the executives get free lounge and box access for free. So much for being "good stewards", "shareholder oriented" and "value creators". Couple this with free private jets, it's one never-ending party for the ultra rich. The rest of us get pink slips and anxiety.

Has T Rowe Price ever had a "corporate tent" at the Preakness race? If so, did they have one this year? Hiring cheap labor really opened the door for "leadership" to treat themselves right - VIP suites at Orioles and Ravens and waterfront harbor views. Paid lunches and dinners in Harbor East. Who knows what else. Must be nice.

It is not about expecting a reward. I actually get a real sense of satisfaction from doing a job well, no matter where I am or who I work for. But here is the thing all of us have to accept. Do not expect loyalty back. Do not expect appreciation. Do not expect any of it to protect you. When cuts come, you will be out the door just as fast as the person who does nothing. Maybe faster. Whatever corporate culture this place supposedly had is long gone. If it ever existed at all.

Many of the holes are being now plugged with today’s org announcements. AD to the Chief of staff office. That pretty much confirms CH can stop dual hat and will be head of downstream.

Yet to be seen if Meg has the fortitude to send GB and WL packing. Or at the very least move GB over to some Tech center role where he can’t continue destroying value.

This site is a potential gold mine for management, assuming they genuinely care about understanding what employees are thinking. Reading this board gives a pretty clear view of what is happening inside the organization, though I could be wrong.

Management should identify the main themes being discussed on Layoff.com and measure engagement around them, then do the same on LinkedIn. Combining those two data points would likely provide a much more accurate picture of what is happening on the ground.

The board should require executives to do this instead of relying on sanitized surveys that get massaged beyond recognition.

Food for thought.

Anyone have any insight as to why modeling was moved out of corporate risk?

Welcome to the penny stock category. Well done C-level - we'll deserved mega compensation packages.

TRend at Bnym, and it’s not subtle.
More and more employees are being “RIF’d” under the disguise of performance issues — even when their track record is spotless. Let’s call it what it is: ageism and salary targeting.Batman and Robin don’t want to admit they’re cutting older, higher‑paid workers, so they hide behind manipulated evaluations and vague buzzwords like “not agile enough,” “not aligned with culture,” or “needs more energy.” It’s a cost‑cutting strategy dressed up as performance management.
This isn’t about merit.
It’s about money, age, and who they think they can push out quietly.
I should have fought your bullsh-t but didn't. I hope others do and this POS company gets what they deserve.

It’s very evident that ConocoPhillips has created a real niche and is running on automatic. The companies top leadership and enforcement arm…HR has manufactured a false reality with pretty impressive results. What happens when timelines and realities converge and expose or challenge this fragile ecosystem? Is COP a quarterly darling or do real reality and fragility intersect?

Walmart will reduce its workforce by about 1,000 people. The company's corporate staff faces these reductions. Store workers are not included in this round of layoffs. Major job reductions target corporate offices in Arkansas and California. Local Walmart store positions are mostly secure.

Bucks County

https://www.phillyburbs.com/story/news/local/2026/05/13/walmart-layoffs-arkansas-are-stores-affected-pa/90058151007/

BNY has finished its evolution from financial institution to LinkedIn‑themed performance art, where optics outrank output and your “personal brand” is the only deliverable that matters.

Real work is optional; what counts is the curated feed of hallway selfies, Teams‑call enthusiasm, and gratitude posts praising and thanking the EC, all polished to a corporate shine.

Following RV's brilliant example, Leadership has quietly traded competence for corporate‑influencer energy, rewarding visibility over execution because it’s easier to manage a workforce obsessed with image than one asking hard questions.

The shift isn’t accidental. It’s a distraction from layoffs, offshoring, and AI quietly absorbing job families. If employees stay busy perfecting “leadership presence,” they won’t notice the restructuring happening beneath them. BNY doesn’t want performers — it wants performances. Show up to the photo‑op town hall, drop a few “inspiring journey” hashtags, give a like to an EC empathy post, sing hallelujah praises to the almighty RV and EC team and suddenly you’re a rising star, even if your actual output fits on a sticky note.

At BNY, the only performance that matters is the one you can screenshot.