Different sets of rules and privileges based on where one sits within the organization. No advancement opportunity. Only laterals. HR knowingly supports unqualified and occasionally abusive management at the expense of talented staff leaving (often without another job) or being fired. There are groups that annually lose 40% of their staff year after year and hr and senior management pretends everything is just great. When organizational culture survey results come in with poor results, HR and senior management remove the questions from the next survey rather than addressing the issue. A couple years ago trust scored very low, so they simply removed it from the survey. Said it was no longer relevant. Rather than address a very real and growing culture of fear and mistrust, they changed the way they evaluate employee satisfaction. This is called unethical manipulation.
The current culture, emanating from the CEO down increasingly since 2011, is that the boss must always be right no matter what. Questioning this ultimately leads to a written warning. If they want to fire you, management with HR's blessing uses fear and manipulation to emotionally degrade and manufacture a performance issue until the time period expires and you are terminated. My manager refused to develop written performance objectives with me as is called for in the employee handbook, and spent nearly three months trying to trip me up. HR's response to my concern about not having objectives was to "just do my job" . I did my job, but my manager manipulatively withheld email and verbal responses to time sensitive questions until the deadlines had passed, and only then responded to say that I had missed deadlines. I documented everything, so could see how these examples of performance issues cited in my termination letter consisted of instances where my manager manipulated to create a specific outcome, and HR fully supported the lying manager. Overall a lousy and unethical culture of dishonesty and fear that has become institutionalized. PMI is ok , I guess, if you have no ambition and just want to punch a clock, keep your head down and collect a mediocre paycheck. Sadly, I have a dozen or more former colleagues - all talented contributors in most cases for years - who had variations of this experience, and am sorry to say that I know a few current employees who are right now starting to go through this humiliating process.
