Hey folks, AMEX employee here. Anyone feeling like there is a forced attrition or forced resignation so that AMEX doesn't pay severance or unemployment? If you feel like leadership has turned, only way to catch them is with data points. i.e. multiple instances of people feeling this way. If there is a true strategy, it'll show.
15 replies (most recent on top)
Agree! Amex employ disciplinary actions to employ agents to resign or be terminated. If you challenge the status quo, you are targeted. Why audit those agents. There should be a focus on auditing leadership.
Amex does not do layoffs. They call it restructuring and eliminate your position. Quite recently due to a certain DEI (focus more on the I) leader who took over CEG, they will fire you under vague “misconduct” charges without ever citing what the misconduct done was or what evidence they acquired in the phony baloney investigations.
My advice: the lure of the brand should only count for at max 3 years stay, post that you should head for the visa/mastercard hills which has better pay
This is happening again at Amex!!!
They want you to leave, doesn't matter who, they will always find some poor, gullible schmuck internally to backfill your role, even if they aren't a good fit for it. Heck they will hire a 30-year, true blue boxer janitor over an Ex-JP Morgan Chase financial consultant if it means offering a lower base salary.
It's by clever, yet, nefarious design. Depending on what market unit you work in, you'll realize that some team members aren't treated as strictly compared to some others. There is some selective "coaching out" happening. If the leader likes you, you can avoid back to office mandates altogether and even kick back from managing some markets as I have seen. If he/she doesn't, tough luck, your KPIs have gone up by 500% while your farewell party is being drafted in Outlook and Slack.
Now, with rents going up massively in Manhattan New York, I should've left 2 years ago before all this began in June. Probably for an innovative FinTech like Revolut, Wise, Remitly, Robinhood, Venmo or Coinbase.
Bottom line is, things are going to get worse for you folks with a Reduction In Force happening without the usual CEG (aka HR Rebrand) bells and whistles inside a termination room. They will send you farewell cards expecting you to leave without severance.
Question is...are you prepared?
The most dangerous time to be a worker in a listed company is when the CEO is looking to retire by maximizing stock compensation packages. He does this by cutting costs and squeezing markets. Obviously, life for every Amexer and lifer inside the blue box is about to get hard for 2024+. So get ready for forced attrition and big news from the CEO.
Sounds ageist, but nearly everyone that gets laid off at companies I had worked for prior to joining Amex...happened just before the CEO "resigned", cashed out and either retired or moved onto a competitor...as is corporate tradition.
When the CEO is being paid based on the performance of the company's stock, he has two goals:
- Sell as much debt, network and card fees to the customer/merchant to boost his remuneration package,
- Sc--w you (the worker) over.
I'd be looking for a better job if I were you.
"If you feel like leadership has turned, only way to catch them is with data points."
Well, they don't care and never once did since 2021. They never once asked workers in their yearly surveys on how they felt about remote/office hybrid work. This was an executive unilateral move done without employee consultation to slowly demoralize and to wear down colleagues so that they would resign. Now, it would be interesting if they mandated that everyone return to the office 5 days a week (which is starting to feel like the case here in the US). That would be a complete 180-degree flip from Amex tradition.
Instead, it was the cheaper B30s that are leaving at a fast rate, not the B35s+ who enjoy their cushy jobs doing nothing except finger point and tell their junior B30s what to do. If that was their intention I'd say it backfired spectacularly.
"Anyone feeling like there is a forced attrition or forced resignation so that AMEX doesn't pay severance or unemployment?"
Well, the boomer that's been at Amex for 10+ years - and hasn't worked a real job with serious KPIs - is knocking on the door of the CEO to pay them out a retirement villa and their massive 401Ks - is certainly feeling it. Those with massive severance packages are complicit to the micromanaging shenanigans we are witnessing. Probably because none of them want to be terminated without severance pay for RTO misconduct.
It's funny though, because my Director threatened to terminate my employment if I didn't do my RTOs, but other team members falsified medical certificates to go fully remote. The working conditions have made the mental health of our colleagues who do go to the office worse off because they now have to deal with office politics or leaders they don't necessarily like. So there is definitely forced attrition going on.
What was intriguing to me back then was that when team members were given the choice to sit where they like they sat anywhere but with each other despite them selling us that RTOs build "team spirit" and "collaboration". They then micromanaged where we sat and on what days we had to go into the office. My manager doesn't like my VP, the Director was constantly trying to waste my time teaching her how to design stuff (she also runs a side business in the creative area so I would be helping her side hustle not just in Amex), the VP doesn't exactly know what he is doing, unqualified people were being promoted solely on tenure, and the way underperforming and delinquent employees were treated was at best a pat on the back.
But I didn't care. As it should be when leaders above you don't like you.
Safe to say, I was polishing my resignation letter for months and moved on to better things.
I agree Debt Slayer 999. The 2021 colleague experience survey ranked purpose on job as the worst rated metric above all. But you can't blame them, we are a credit card company, our values are to encourage people to engage in endless hedonism, materialism and nihilism to fuel our revenue. It's part of the credit card workplace culture where it's expected that colleagues put themselves in massive debt to live a YOLO life while living pay cheque to pay cheque.
Consequently, most colleagues who work here don't derive meaning in their work. It's just Central dictating terms of your work. Local leaders are irrelevant in most cases so having career development, pep talks are pointless when they are your bosses on paper, but don't issue you work in reality. This has sc--wed country managers over in the past.
You do realise that Amex has some of the lowest turnover rates in the financial services industry? So low in fact that the cost of voluntarily laying off its high % of highly tenured colleagues will be so catastrophic to the share price that it will be the end of the CEO Steve Squeri.
RTO mandates only incentivise those who have been at the company for <2 years to leave because they stand to lose less compared to a 20+ year Amexer with a $300,000 USD retirement package who has been to the office 3-5 days a week pre-pandemic. To an old timer RTOs are easy.
Beginning 2023 they (Rafa, Rob and some douche bag consulting firm probably BCG given Muhammed Badi's connections to them) first announced their ICS restructuring which led to numerous voluntary redundancies, then a global headcount hiring freeze, then an RTO mandate increase from 2 days averaging a week over time to 3 days a week minimum, and then eliminated FXIP across non-US markets. That was when I got up and left.
With the recent acquisition of Discover Credit Cards by Capital One, the growing threat of neo banks and FinTech credit card startups - really the only thing keeping this company alive is more money into the marketing meat grinder catering to the ultra rich.
I find it ironic that despite serving wealthy customers, the company pays far too below industry rates for its colleagues. But it's the kind of place you would work if you were perfectly okay with your employer giving you a back massage while taking $1000-3,000 a month out of your paycheck. Most people who work at Amex find their careers "meaningless".
Started in June. Glad I left their RTO mandates.
Layoffs/reorgs are happening folks. They're keeping very quiet about. As is amex tradition.
Yes absolutely. It started summer of 2023. The conditions became so unbearable I quit. They did fire someone immediately after Christmas.
I felt the same. This started around June. The first half of the year was going well and then suddenly all this micromanagement and non-stop questions.
Yes! This started last June.
What department are you in?