Not a great place anymore - Product Owner (PO) Lloyds Banking Group Employee Review

Lloyds Banking Group used to be a great place to work however recent changes to its leadership team are rapidly eroding the trust, goodwill and enjoyment of colleagues within the Group. This current incumbent leadership confuse pace for progress with several recent people-led decisions brutally enforced to the detriment of thousands of colleagues. There is an air of distrust about the leadership evidenced by an unwillingness to listen to colleague voice, but also in their determination to plough their will at any cost. Instead of engaging with, and capturing the hearts and minds of colleagues, this leadership team seems hell bent on destroying the fabric of this once great organisation. Archaic and frankly backwards changes to things like 'flexible working arrangements' and it's assault on stamping out compressed working patterns, so often the great leveller for female and geographical fairness, is now reflective of the decision making being executed at the top level. Pair this if you will, with the irony that the organisation will also produce reports on topics such as the gender pension gap but fail to acknowledge its own role in being a leading contributor to this issue. The new leadership team have instilled a culture of fear, where the ability to speak up and out across key things once considered important to the business, is now met with a view that if you don't tow the party line then here is the door. This can be further supported by the most recent of colleague surveys once aimed at measuring engagement which now seek to place people in the camp of being either in love with the organisation or not, and this extremely polarity of responses enables the Group to marginalise those whom don't answer the correct response. Instead of using data driven decisions, major changes are now made for it's people strategy that feel more driven by viewpoints and niggles - rather than by what actually matters. Another side to the Group is that it's relentless focus on excelling rapid promotions of those from university educated backgrounds has created a raft of leaders whom are incapable of challenging upwards, and whom lack real leadership behaviours. This not only creates a new element of bias and a lack of diversity of thought but also often ignores the experience and ability of longer serving colleagues whom often end up overlooked for promotions. A great example is that the business is now more obsessed with 'what people say' as appose to what their output is, with initiatives in my last area often being immeasurably vague or just frankly tackling the wrong problem. Once again - pace vs progress. My final observation is that this is now a business with some of the most confusing communicators I have ever come across in my time there. There are now very senior figures whom struggle to articulate and answer questions or challenges on divisional calls and do not seem to be able to outline a clear strategy. This often leads to a complete lack of confidence and trust in those leaders and colleagues becoming disillusioned with the Groups actual vision. An example of this is with senior leaders using outlandish headlines to justify changes like 'we need to change now, to be here in 5 years time'. Let's not forget, LBG is the biggest UK bank, I'm fairly confident it will never fail... financial results and publicly available reports show you that's in pretty good shape. This current narrative from senior leaders ignores honesty and integrity and instead uses it as a shield to hide behind. It saddens me that this once great organisation is now creating a really difficult place for many colleagues to work. Some people might see this review as someone who's just had a bad experience but I'd point you to the data that's readily available on here to see. A quick look at the review graph for this Group shows an organisation that at the end of last year scored over 4, and yet just 10 months later finds itself at 3.3 and falling, ask yourself - can't just be me right?