- Low salary, low salary increase (if any), very low bonus (if any). Each role has allocated band range. Mostly, it doesn’t really matter how well you do your job, you wont get a proper raise until you meet some criteria and i think its the criteria that the 1st line managers use and play with, to manage your salary expectation. “You haven’t done this or that in order to get a raise”, “You have to achieve certain accreditation to speak about salary raise” and even if you do what was asked, there is going to be another condition most likely.
- Ever increasing expectations: the more work you get done, the more work you will receive. Once you become a reliable person who gets work done, you get rewarded with more work. And quite often, you end up doing the work of others because they are lazy, inadequate, slow or irresponsible.
- Demotivated employees: thats something that i feel is impacting IBM overall. It feels like 80% of the people are avoiding hard work, or challenging situations. Rarely anybody wants to take ownership of difficult tasks. A good team spirit is rare to find. Everyone wants to just cover his own butt, some are good at kissing up to their managers, playing it safe, and smart, make the KPI’s look good. So much politics. No real work gets done well. There are very few outstanding employees, very few good leaders and managers, but most others are average. There are some employees that i would probably fire if it was up to me. No one feels threatened of being fired, so they do whatever they want and cant care less.
- Checkpoint: the new performance evaluation session which takes place every 3 months. In that session you have to sell your self and explain what good things you have done and how does it fit in the 5 key dimensions (you just have to do whatever it takes to fit your achievements within the 5 dimensions) and when you are done complimenting yourself, then the bashing starts. Manager tells you of all the things that you need to work on to improve yourself and it’s really shocking how conflicting the evaluation is every session. One time, you are good at something, next time you are not. Probably, it’s a way to make you feel you are not good enough yet so don’t ask for salary raise or even think about it. I think this method is pushing many people out of the company.
- Lack of motivation: there is little to be motivated about. After some time you realize, you will get nowhere financially, you get more workload assigned, and of course higher position doesnt mean better money, you get the same money and only the potential or promise of getting more money after good job and meeting certain conditions, and that could take months or even a couple years. If your goal is to just advance in your career so that you gain experience so that one day you get a better paid job elsewhere, then that could be a good motivation. I bet you most are thinking that way.
- Lots of changes its tiring to keep up: company keeps transforming, renaming, shuffling, sunsetting tools, bringing others some of which are mandatory to use, then sunsetting them again, freezes hiring, then unfreezes, cuts costs everywhere possible, restructures, merge positions and responsibilities, dozens of announcements, changes of processes which then get forgotten. I am not sure how can the company find stability with so many changes happening in one year.
