The company seems to be making much lately of suddenly caring for employees' mental health, eg the mental health day next month. Call me very cynical, but it's a pity the company didn't exhibit such a "caring" attitude when it quite happily laid off over 12 % of its workforce from 2018-2020, many at Thanksgiving and at Xmas. Seems the added stress caused to those former employees having their livelihoods suddenly taken away from them wasn't an issue.
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Have just read the comments for this post. Can’t help but wonder how effective it was to have some suit sitting in New York or Toronto with a spreadsheet going through selecting people to be RIF’d. They wouldn’t have a clue about employees in other parts of the US or in other countries. Tends to suggest considerable input from managers in those areas where the RIF’s took place. Really says a lot.
A couple of people here apparently cannot spot sarcasm when I said the mental health day (along with “Juneteenth”) was virtue signaling. I am not an HR lady either.
Virtue signaling? Yet another appearance by the HR lady.
It is purely virtue signaling.
It may be the case that it's HR's role to support the company, but there is no excuse for being unprofessional in what they do, which from reading the comments here and elsewhere, suggests that there has been quite a lot of that.
I, for one, was not impressed with how they handled my lay off. Sure lay offs are stressful and difficult, but as a minimum they should be handled with dignity and respect. I came away feeling like a criminal would have been treated better.
It would also appear that they certainly spend a lot of time monitoring what it written here and coming back at times with the company's propaganda. Perhaps they should ask themselves why is it that the TR thread on this website never dies?
You all need to understand that the role of HR is to support the co. not employees. I actually was told this when I worked at another co. It astonished me and yet as I thought about it it made a lot of sense. I don't agree but the co. makes the hires and obviously wants to be protected. It's why so many employee complaints go unanswered. As is the case with s-xual harassment....they do nothing until the complaints sack up and they can no longer deny them. Then, HR comes back to past complainants and expects them to go on record. Shameful!
Completely agree with all the comments and one I do want reference is how HR handles these RIF's. They say they want it to be respectful for all involved, however I couldn't disagree any more. HR was surprisingly unresponsive and ineffective. That function as I know it should be protecting not only TR but employees as well. When they see a disservice where high caliber, long tenured, high performing individuals are being let go because of something like the boss didn't like them or they weren't in the right office, they should step in. Those are not valid reasons and loyalty goes both ways. If they weren't aggressive about providing severance, there would be quite a number of lawsuits. If new senior leadership really wants to get insight into the segment management teams and how they operate,, they should reach out to folks who have left TR whether willingly or not and talk with them. The people still there are in preservation mode and afraid anything they say, no matter how truthful, will result in retribution, which in the past was definitely the case.
Couldn’t help but notice in one of the comments below that they said they were connected to a recruitment company when they were RIF’d. Can’t say this was ever offered to me when I was RIF’d. I was also promised a certificate of service before I left - still waiting for that. There’s more, but if I posted it, it would seem like a work of fiction. All in all, the professionalism demonstated by HR was the pits.
I also agree with the comment made about some really high performers let go, while some people bordering on incompetency were left untouched. Go figure. With decisions made like that, TR will never be a top 100 company.
As for the apparent increase in micro managing. Straight out of the scientific management school. Didn’t work in the 1920s and won’t work now.
I was laid off in the 2019 wave. It hurt at the time ( especially the way it was so badly done), but I did get severance and bonus. I always met and exceeded my metrics, went out of the way to help. They kept a couple of people who I know never met metrics and a few who cut corners and cheated the system. It is nice that they got two more company holidays. I wonder how many they’ll have to lay off this year to make up for this.
What does it really mean when a leader is on "extended leave"? Is that a polite cover for something else?
You're not wrong when you say "the common theme was their boss didn't like them or felt threatened". Nothing has changed, these people have just had to pull their heads in the interim and bide their time. The sad thing is how these insecure people ever got into these positions of power, and how vindictive some of them are.
I was one of those let go in the 2018 wave, I did feel bad at the time since I thought it was done unfairly and based on a speadsheet of selected names rather than a proper assessment of performance and that's what was bad about it. We were fairly compensated though and given mental assistance in the form of TR connecting us to a recruitment company that helped me find my next position elsewhere.
I've read about the current mental health day at TR, and I think we are talking different times and circumstances, it's to tackle employee morale during a pandemic where everyone is stuck at home and there's no separation between personal and work life. I have some ex-colleagues who are still good friends and who are still with TR and they say despite an immense pressure to perform and a totally different atmosphere driven by what you close in sales and what money you bring in, it's still a decent and humane company to work with in that they did not slash salaries or put people on unpaid leave like other companies did during tough times.
I'm not defending TR, and I wouldn't wish to be working there again anyway due to what I hear are micro-management practices that weren't as pronounced back in the day, driven by top managers who really don't know what they're doing or how things are done on a field level; but just putting your remarks in a fair perspective, different times and different circumstances, COVID comes with health paranoia, job insecurity, future uncertainty, that are beyond the consequences of a corporate take over from a venture capitalist like when they started Refinitiv.
It's new senior leadership, maybe they know they need people engaged and motivated to do the job. Don't kid yourself the people did all that dirty work over the past couple of years are still the same, they just have to adjust to the new surroundings, like snakes. To be honest, I don't believe they truly care about your mental health, they just need to say they are and institute some things that "show" they care. I personally know and worked with dozens of people who were nothing short of exceptional at what they do, but the common theme was their boss didn't like them or felt threatened. Do you think those folks really changed, absolutely not.