When I left the company, it was a pretty toxic place to work.
Most noticeable of the negative aspects on display were the inclination of senior management to use their positions of authority to grind axes, more than a few employees further down the ladder than they have been treated in a cowardly, spiteful manner that was in most cases as far as I could see, entirely undeserved. These employees also found themselves marginalised from any of the showcase programs, undermined by Chinese whispers vigorously propagated about their ‘lack of ability’ and in one case a Chartered Engineer no less was pushed into the corner of a lab to build boxes for several months, for no other readily apparent reason than fear (read jealousy) of the said individual.
Though easy to blame HR, it is the group of gangsters currently masquerading as GDUK senior management that need properly sorting out.
Their behaviour and conduct was far below the professional and ethical standards expected of people in their positions, their inclination to round on individuals that they simply didn’t like the look of was pretty disturbing, along with their classless, petty trick of keeping said individuals out of mainstream programs and thereby impeding any progress within the company promotional framework. This contrived and artificially engineered lack of achievement would then be used against the individual concerned at appraisal time by the very same people. At the time I left there were one or two individuals being held back within the company on the grounds of nothing more than spite, jealousy and cowardly behaviour; people with good quals, good experience and good references from their previous companies ie people with no track record for underperforming.
As a former employee with GD and previously with other global companies, I have come across the best and the worst of HR.
At their very best, HR personnel are dedicated, intelligent, informed experts who possess the rare quality of thinking corporately; as such, they are a credit to their company and to the management that runs it: meeting them is a pleasure, and it's plain to see that they perform the all-important task of being the 'eyes and ears' of a company really well: they are also vastly over-worked and often under-resourced.
At their worst, they are mean, ill-informed, narrow-minded, inexperienced egocentrics whose principal interests lie in self-promotion and the protection of the narrow interests of their immediate environment. They rubber-stamp whatever senior management tells them to rubber-stamp and having sold their souls, become nothing more than the senior management yes-man.
One group becomes an indispensable aid to the well being of a company; the other hurts and hinders it.
Funnily enough, it's not HR that should be condemned, but GD’s senior management, who are often quite happy to abrogate their responsibility to the well-being and future development of their company by the cowardly and convenient means of delegating important, but sometimes inconvenient decisions to the first port of call of poor management, namely HR.
It’s not what you know, it’s who’s slapping your back – if you’re looking for pastures new, go somewhere else.
