S1 reviews

In the last few years, there have been some major changes in management, and not for the better. Employees are frequently pigeonholed and not allowed to train or learn new skills, but those in the "in crowd" are. If you do a job well, expect to be "pigeonholed" and not given the opportunity to move into a different area. Too much focus has been placed on hiring outsourced resources in order to reduce costs. Management in the last few years seems to really enjoy belittling employees and making them feel bad. Praise is rarely given, if at all. A lot of resources are being stretched very thin, but being held accountable when quality suffers. Pay raises have been mediocre the last few years (if at all). Management has also gotten very "top heavy" the last few years (how many VPs does the company need?), while worker bees are being laid off frequently.

The up-and-coming senior managers are the ones who believe in the "all stick, no carrot" approach to motivating their subordinates. This philosophy is being force fed to middle management, who are slowly adopting it with disastrous results. An highly competent associate was given a scathing performance review, and then asked why she was leaving when she found another position. Similarly, another highly competent associate was told he would be fired if he didn't start performing better. When he turned in his resignation upon finding a new position, his manager was shocked. Both these situations resulted in frantic scrambles to find someone to fill the vacancy, because both these people were solid performers, pulling significant shares of the workload.