I survived so many layoffs, but I also watched people who gave everything get walked out like criminals. This place has a tendency to reward loyalty with a cardboard box. Now I come in, do the minimum, and spend my real energy on job applications and training courses. I'm not waiting to be the next one they discard.
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@fc One my early mentors used to say "if you put a good performer in a bad system, the system will win every time." The people left at Wells after Charlie's rampage of the last six years aren't just the people who weren't good enough to find jobs elsewhere. There's certainly some of that, the brain drain is real. But I also think there's a lot of people here who are or could be solid performers in an organization with healthy incentives and work culture. These are people who couldn't leave, often for life reasons that had nothing to do with how they are as workers, who are also having their potential crushed out of them by a performatively cruel c-suite, unforgiving monitoring of performance factors that do not matter, incentives that reward the worst behaviors, a neverending campaign of zero job security, and a host of other negative variables.
Mentally checking out and giving your least instead of your best is an adaptive response to the toxic environment here.
Yep. The problem for the long term health of the company is that the end result is a group of employees that have no other options and generally aren't very good. The best will leave for better companies (if young) or simply retire (the olds). What does that leave? No chance of future company success, that's what. I've made peace with HY ki-ling WF. It's an eventuality at this point and I'm fine with it. Just want my severance and I will sail off into the sunset.
Boy, I sure hope I am the one they discard.
@bt
This explains about 95% of all the "why don't people just quit" and "if you don't like it here, quit" posts.
Young and your first gig? Build skills then bolt.
Been here a few years? You know the ropes, quiet quit, pump out resumes and bolt.
Been here for decades? Stay the course, do just enough to get you an IM and hope they lay you off. If not then retire.
It is winning if you're close to retirement or just adding another year of service to get more severance. If you're young and trying to build a career? Not so much in that case, so it really depends on where you are in life.
But it's also not losing and unfortunately that's life sometimes, just keeping your head above water
@aq Bootlick much?
When the leader of the company makes it clear there's a target around your neck, eventually, there's only a few rational responses:
GTFO, if you can
if you can't easily leave, but you don't worry that much about a layoff and would welcome the break, scale down your work to the minimum necessary to stay off the "not meets" list (which is mostly about keeping a good relationship with your manager more than about your contribution)
if you can't leave and need to keep your job, become risk adverse. Avoid hanging your neck out there and focus on trying to find projects that are stable and well funded to associate with. Don't do anything that might make your coworkers look good, better them be targets than you
Nothing in what Charlie has built serves to foster proactive contribution, risk-taking, ownership, or initiative. Everyone is either looking for the exit, quiet quitting, politicking with their manager, or trying to find places to hide in slow moving, low risk initiatives that have limited potential for transformational impact. Or some combination of the above. I'm sure the ever falling headcount numbers look good on shareholder reports (and help Charlie get it up at night), but the toxicity of the environment he's created is going to take years to recover from.
If you think the average WF corporate office worker is "giving everything" you are living in an alternate reality. Most of them spend their days playing grab a$$, surfing the internet and whining about how unfair life is because they cant sit on their couch all day. All while making 150k a year.
I believe everyone has their moment of clarity.
Even diehard workers with strong work ethics.
When you see people walked out with 30 or 45 years at wells Fargo.
You reach that point.
Do not give wells Fargo your best energy or your best ideas.
Do not do anything that would make wells fargo better or more efficient.
Do not give them anything they can monetize or IP.