I keep hearing about layoffs and I keep hoping one of them is going to affect many of the useless management layers that we have but it never happens. It's always those who are doing the important work who get laid off, never the real fat. Do we need managers with less than five direct reports?
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This isn’t the place to look for sound logic. None of the RTO enforcement has anything to do with performance, it is about theatrics and control.
Welcome to day care
The shortsightedness and fundamental lack of understanding demonstrated by the execs is startling sometimes. WFH people are a problem eh? Ok, let's look at this and turn our brains on. Imagine you have two employees. They both have the same job description, workload and quality requirements. Fred comes in to the office 3 days a week and gets his work done on time and with good quality. Whether he's in the office or at home he works a solid 8 hour day. The execs love Fred. Bob is 100% remote. He is the kind of person that company tracking and execa love to hate. He gets his work done with good quality with roughly 5 hours invested per day and doesn't seem to be doing much the other 3 hours.
Director makes the call and fires Bob. He's not in a hub and he's only working 5 hours a day.
Question: why are you firing the most efficient employee when, with proper management, you could leverage that efficiency to get much more done and at lower cost? More importantly, do you think the competition isn't smart enough to figure that out?
Here's the Playbook for Layoff "Waves":
- Halt New Hires / Backfill requests
- Institute a Site Strategy that targets Remote Workers, those in non-hub cities, and those that refuse to conform to RTO.
- Re-Org entire LoBs to consolidate like functions and eliminate employees who are redundant.
- Ruthlessly apply Spans and Layers criteria to eliminate managers who don't comply.
- Repeat every ~7 years or in conjunction with the business cycles and new CEOs.
Doing this makes too much sense, which means our leaders will not do it
Yeah, well, I guess we have that in common with these very temporary "executives". This current group of NYC hacks will be gone in a year or two.
Yep, completely lob dependent, even down to specific groups within lobs. For instance, conduct did implement spans and layers, fin crimes did not (within a certain biz group). Have heard layoffs will target managers with zero to only a few directs. Layoffs will also start targeting those who are not in hubs. The company will eventually get rid of those not in a hub. Location strategy was put on hold due to covid, but there are many senior execs who want remote employees gone.
I know plenty of people that were canned over "spans and layers". Good employees too, who suddenly became expendable because they only had 6 directs. It's very lob dependant and stupid.
@xgu+1lv9BvHM All that spans and layers did was shift people around, some managers were moved into IC roles as a result but presumably are still making the same salary… and now you have a lot more “dotted line” reporting which can create confusion at times… what a complete waste of time and energy
there was a whole spans and layers initiative a while back. some areas went all in with it while others not so much. I've heard some chatter of renewed instrist in it. when all is said and done you shouldn't have managers managing one or two people.
I was among the second wave of tech layoffs in home mortgage. First where the BSC. Nice people but mostly note takers. At Wells there is no awareness of design (DDD, BDD, ODD). My wave was the creators or ex-creators. These were the folks who actually created the spaghetti code or were trying to reengineer it. Regardless, folks who actually worked on the code. The maintainers... kiss ...ss to managers remained. The maintainers would occasionally work on configuration, define product releases acted really big and "know it alls". IMO there are multiple layers of maintainers and management to be removed at Wells in order for it to be competitive.
Just managers on the risk team will be targeted for all the expensive compliance failures.
Managers will not be laid off. They will simply no longer be managers. Their titles will change to Senior Lead _______ Officer. Their direct reports will be redistributed and/or laid off.
@rca+1lv9BvHM Ah so they are the standard WF caliber manager
I can't see any meaniful reduction in the management layers anytime soon. In fact the "fat" has gotten worse, I'm now on a team with an analytical manager who has no idea on how to code (pull data). They are a former operations manager which is insane as I doubt they'd ever get hired as an individual contributor in this team without those skills. They cannot help when there is a problem, constantly misunderstand how long data takes to pull but kisses a$$ to our exec and is all over RTO so I'm sure they will not be let go.
I'm out of this place the first chance I get.
@jsx+1lv9BvH
10 hours a week? LOL
Projecting much?
Wells Fargo, the bank of whiners. I don’t understand why people complain so much and stay. If you hate it then leave, it’s not complicated.
I enjoy working maybe 10 hours a week tops even with RTO. It’s easy money and I use my free time to skill up. Maybe you whiners should do the same.