In the first 60 days of work at DXC, the leadership led by Mike Lawrie have managed to drain any joy or pride from working at this company. For the nine months leading up to the merger, they had the opportunity to build something amazing – we would be the largest end-to-end IT services company in the world with a rich heritage of leading the market from at least one of our legacy companies. Brand new – we could create an exciting, agile, client-centric culture.
Instead on Day 1, some employees were invited to celebrate the launch and then hours later informed they would be laid off. Employees – had they been notified 2 days earlier – would have received quaduple the severance package due to a more generous legacy severance policy. Employees have not been given DXC-branded badges; we were told to cover the logo of our legacy company with a sticker and continue to use those as ID. Legacy company systems don’t talk to each other and will not for another 9-18 months. Legacy HPES employees have been introduced to tools that we stopped using 10 years ago and now are being told this is the new go-forward platform. Business cards are forbidden to 99% of the employees because DXC’s expectation that we support the “digital transformation within our industry”; when clients ask for our contact information when meeting them, it’s not clear how we provide that.
Communication is non-existent. On Day 1, we heard nothing from executive leaders in terms of a welcome email or town hall other than on-site celebration events where we watched Mike Lawrie ring the opening bell on Wall Street and talk about how his priority was to bring value to the shareholders. Finally 4 days after launch, employees got an email telling us to go to a link on the new, partly-functioning intranet to locate welcome letters from our new leaders. But the average lay employee has not been informed (over 60 days later) as to what our new roles, teams or leaders will be, so it was up to us to guess as to which letter we should read. Pick a letter…any letter!
Policy is partly-published, part hearsay. If you try to muddle along to figure out process that isn’t deployed, you get told that that action is against policy. The culture here is creating chastened employees who are fearful of a knuckle-rapping for doing something out of policy. Last week, a longtime legacy employee died. As anyone with a beating heart would do, our team sent a $75 floral arrangement to his funeral service. That policy was published as acceptable on the HR website, but the employee who submitted the expense report was not reimbursed because “That policy is out of date. We don’t do that.”
Travel policy is so rigid that if a client asks you to come meet with them with less than 14 days’ notice, you must first push back by asking to meet virtually since this trip will be outside of DXC travel policy. DXC policy trumps clients’ business requirements. Final travel approver is a direct report to the CEO, so if you’d like to take a $250 flight to meet with a client, and you are 6 levels below the CEO, it can take days to get that approved as it winds its way up the approval chain. Even if you submitted it in policy with the 14 days’ notice, by the time it gets up to the last guy on the approval totem, it’s out of policy and rejected. Travel requests are endlessly reworked for miniscule clerical errors or “additional clarification.”
Even the food in the cafeteria is worse in the last 2 months! I saw fruit flies the other day. The bathrooms in the campus I work at smell like a portable john. Trash at our desks is only taken out twice a week. Any action that can be done to shave a few dollars will be executed. The culture reflects values that confine, shrink and operate in scarcity.
The leadership had the better part of a year to get this merger right, to create an exciting, dynamic, client-centric company that employees could contribute to building something meaningful. Instead, the employee experience has been horrific. We’re losing thousands of hours of experience from employees who are leaving for greener pastures, and executive leadership shrugs and counts it as necessary attrition that will bolster the bottom line. I cannot fathom what the client experience is like or will be. This is the cheapest, poorly-run $26B company I’ve ever seen in 25 years of work in this industry. A thorough disappointment.
