Sales are king here. I should say queen as the CEO was just bragging about us being 67% women and leaders are close to 50% women - which has its own set of problems like mean girl cliches and constant drama. Women get promoted over men constantly here regardless of merit. If they aren't watching you go to the bathroom and micro controlling you, they are inept at even doing the job they are managing and managing. I think there may be material for lawsuits soon, I wouldn't be surprised. In fact, I have been keeping records offline in case there is a class action. A IT hiring manager I overheard talking about hiring said they were holding out for a woman to apply for the job, turning down any men that apply so he can meet his quota. He would interview them to string them along and to keep it from looking obvious.
Our core system is decades old and the salesforce system we do have (it was the major leap into modern technology for us, the biggest project we had ever done) is a mess despite the massive resources placed in it, still being placed in it. Everyone has access to almost everything. Because sales wants access to everything. Names and addresses get changes, and are more often wrong than right. The USPS revoked our prefered rate for mailing W4 and 1099 because we send so many bad addresses.
We do things 1 of 2 ways, either we make massive changes that always fail - salesforce was the first and only major change that didn't - or go in stages but never follow through so there are many, many attempts scattered throughout the company still in place doing the same thing but in different areas. It is a patchwork of systems we have created. We introduce new hires to the 50+ systems they may interact with and the wide eyes still makes me chuckle. We don't even have everyone on salesforce because there were a few minor divisions left out (which probably allowed it to be implemented successfully at all, by the skin of its teeth as it was) and have been told they won't ever be integrated.... They are stuck on a wholly in-house software no one still working here has been involved in any meaningful way. There is one support person. We have no idea how to incrementally change AND follow through.
The CEO was super excited because this year they created a 3 year plan. The longest before was a year, which made me shudder a little. That was as long as they ever thought about anything. He also said we need to pull back on the entrepreneurial spirit. I get massive bureaucracies aren't fun, I don't like them, but having more than 3,000 people do things the way they want is chaos. Our clients wonder why we can't bill them properly or consistently. It is because everything is manual on the back end because we let sales promise anything and everything and our decades old system can't handle it. It also creates silos. CHG has more silos than Kansas. Sales hates on business partners for making them do more than just schmoozing clients all day. Business partners hate on sales for not caring about the garbage data they put into the system. Corp hates on divisions because they do their own thing. Divisions hate on Corp because they are cramping their style. Departments hate on department, teams hate on teams. There are smiles when face to face, and snide remarks as soon as the leave the room behind their back.
I was on a focus group recently and I went in dreading the positive cheerleading. That wasn't remotely the case at all. I became the counter point saying that things weren't as bad as being presented by the group. I was the cheerleader in the room and I hate cheerleaders. Read this and think this person was the cheerleader, you can imagine the venom that was expressed in the room. It was bad. It started off with a couple positives and once one person opened the first bad thought, it descended quickly - most from the two that made the initial positive remarks. People fake the positive for everyone else it appears.
