Fidelity has now turned to a systematic process to create a hostile or intolerable work environment that has forced many long term tenured employees to quit or resign. While there have always been the dinosaurs that hung on for purely the comfort of a paycheck, we have now pushed into a full blow game plan of pushing out the knowledgeable tenured employees that care about doing a great job for a once great company. Gone are the days of Standards or Care as they have been replaced by a systematic performance management system that has been put into place to do cut costs at any expense. Clients now can either pay Fidelity to manage their money, buy annuity offerings, get farmed out to WAS advisors or find a new home for their assets. Fidelity has now become just another Southwest Airlines, another choice for customers to make based on cost-benefit and convenience. A business decision for all of us to absorb and then make a decision for what's best for us as the days of being Fidelity's most valued assets as an employee are over. Best wishes and good luck to all!
3 replies (most recent on top)
@cf very personal
Fidelity appears to have made a business decision long ago in response to shrinking margins, automation, fee compression, and a more self-directed investor base. The problem isn’t the decision itself. It’s how that decision has been operationalized.
When a firm replaces professional judgment with opaque performance systems, “standards of care” stops being a value and starts being a slogan. The micro-management intensifies by design. Weekly one-on-ones. Additional check-ins. Maybe a "visit" from a market leader. More oversight framed as “support.” More and more metrics, but less trust.
I experienced this firsthand. It became a slow, unsettling realization that doing the right thing for clients and doing the right thing for the system were no longer the same thing. That tension doesn’t resolve, it accumulates. Over time, it wears you down. (Which I gather is the objective of a constructive discharge.)
Some people resign. Others try to hang on, only to find their work increasingly scrutinized, their judgment second-guessed, and their margin for error shrinking to zero.
It can be soul-crushing. (Which I think is the idea.) For those living it, the cost isn’t just professional, it’s personal.
Best wishes to everyone currently navigating that reality. If its any consolation, what that environment erodes isn’t talent, it’s morale and morale can be rebuilt quickly once you’re no longer inside a system designed to grind it down.
Its fast becoming or has already become are churn & burn culture. Like banking in the early 2000's as the business model was changing due to on-line convenience/ automated advances there is desperate scrambling to maintain relevancy. Banking is obviously still a much-needed industry it has just evolved to where automated process can handle the majority of the transactions. The investment industry has been experiencing this as well- just look at the revenue streams that have evaporated such as trade commissions, expenses ratios being lowered, robo advised accounts but most importantly a more educated investor class demographic change. Let's face it, investing is all about creating a risk based allocation, continually adding to it and staying the course while having a proper emergency savings.
What does this mean to you the employee- you're going to have more added to your already hefty workload and the pace will need to be increased as well so either you adapt or get runover. When Fidelity touts Standards of Care where is that being applied to the employees?