In less than a year, GM upper management spent $10 billion to bring the GM stock up to $50/share so they could cash out their stock options. In this sense, $10 billion was NOTHING to GM. They didn't invest it in plants, education of staff, new equipment, new buildings. No. They cashed out to enrich themselves. Where is the stock today? Crashing. It lost 9% of it's value in 2 days. Today the stock is almost at parity with it's IPO in 2010; $39/share. Pathetic and it's just going to keep tanking with zero growth and a 1% dividend. Give me a break with the employee stock program that offers no discount!!! It's almost laughable how bush league our upper managers are.
Where are we now? Now, just to save less than $1 billion, the upper management has set out to demoralize their 58,000 salary employees with a stack ranking system. If you aren't good enough, you are fired. Morale is tanking. What does bad morale do to a company's productivity? Who cares because Mary, Mark, Paul and others got PAID! It's really that simple. Corporate malfeasance. They don't know what they are doing. They had a business plan and it failed. Now they are going to bleed the company dry while the getting is good.
Now, things are getting worse as different groups are setting new rules. I won't get into what those things are because I don't want to give myself way. But these new arbitrary rules are not evenly applied - they vary from group to group. Why? I believe that upper managers are studying how effective these different rule sets are. You are a lab rat! Better make that wheel go faster.
Just like the RTO, I believe it's pretty obvious they think they are making us more productive and accountable but in reality they are destroying morale and making life more difficult for nothing. Or it could be that they are setting more compliance traps. You didn't comply with the new rules, so you are out. Will all this backfire? Absolutely.
It's really amusing when you think back to when we were lectured on how GM was creating a work life balance and that we were "one team". It didn't last too long did it? Now we are back to 'tell on your neighbor' and 'take credit for the new innovation'. It's going to get really ugly and stressful faster than I thought it would.