LMI reviews

Unfortunately, things are changing for the worse. Our CEO has announced that benefits will be cut dramatically starting January 1, 2015 -- the company will contribute 40 percent less to our retirement and senior staffers are losing a week's vacation. Those senior staffers are also being forced to cash out half of the vacation days they were able to save up for future use. This is after a recent cut in healthcare benefits and some money- saving "improvements" to other less-used benefits (I didn't actually mind those). In addition, in recent years my pay raises have been very small and not even close to keeping up with inflation, despite superior performance reviews. LMI does have year-end bonuses but even those decreased in the last year. The management staff seem to get stratospheric bonuses while the research staff get very small ones. All of this is a little surprising given the fact that we have been told our company is financially strong. Indeed, every year has been better than the previous one (if better is measured by new business). It seems that our new corporate strategy is to be the low cost provider of services to the government. Other cost cutting measures include moving all staff out of their existing offices and into cubicles in a new building to save on floorspace. Interestingly enough overhead costs seem to be going up - our CEO keeps appointing more administrative vice presidents to solve the problem. The really troubling aspect of all of this is that our company has already taken a hit in quality due to some rampant growth in recent years. With the recent changes, talented and experienced staff are now updating their resumes and some have already left -- it seems like there is another going-away party every few days. Turnover is definitely on the rise. With modest salaries to begin with, it was already hard to attract talented people and now it's getting even worse because of the benefit cuts. There are lots of resumes for every job opening, but most are unqualified. As a result, quality is continuing to fall -- the recent cuts are the straw that is breaking the camel's back for LMI.

A wide-spread sense of fear and uncertainty; a declining sense of "we can make this work, somehow, someway". A perhaps unbridgeable gap in trust between staff and management. Little sense that management is committed to helping staff succeed. Understand that the CEO is an introvert, but then why fire the very extroverted COO who did so much to reach out to young and mid-career staff? We know the leadership cares for LMI, but why not share our successes (including our financial successes) more widely with the staff. As had been said elsewhere, the benefit cuts were widely perceived as tradeoffs for executive salaries and bonuses -- but those tradeoffs were never discussed honestly and openly. The LMI staff is not stupid, and we won't fall for just any flimsy cover story. Level with us, and we can at least decide whether to respect your candor; lie to us, and you'll lose all of your standing.