Check out this doozy. "Our second set of priorities ... involves becoming more capable, leaner, more agile and less bureaucratic," CEO Ramon Laguarta said. "In doing so, we will drive down cost and that enables us to plow the savings back into the business to develop scale and sharpen core capabilities that drive even greater efficiency and effectiveness creating a virtuous cycle." https://www.businessinsider.com/pepsico-layoffs-begin-restructuring-plan-kicks-off-2019-2
PepsiCo also recently announced plans to restructure the organization and "relentlessly" invest in automation.
Know what else would cut costs? Not advertising all over Atlanta for the super bowl. But nah, make the company small so you can show revenue growth again. The consultants will be happy with that.
Related. One of the biggest failings in corporate America is letting senior leadership get away with corporate speak about agility and efficiency when referring to layoffs (as that PepsiCo quote does). you know what makes things more agile and more efficient? More resources. I know there are cases for automation but generally speaking, you hear that shit all of the time for layoffs even in places where you actually just need people to do work. Cutting teams smaller does neither make things more efficient nor agile.
Hear that phrase easily 2-3 times a day. That or GoToMeeting. Happened at my company last year. New VP comes in, lets go 25% of the staff, everyone else's plate gets bigger and working more hours and the work has suffered. We grow maybe 5% and then he gets rewarded for better profits for our investors. Meanwhile no one got raises last year and we worked longer hours to meet their growth demands. We ended up having 2-3 really talented people leave at the end of the year because of it.
Holy hell - the cascading goals from my bosses boss and my boss are a verbal word vomit/diarrhea salad. No specifics or metrics. I’m getting an education in how to fail upwards. It is not lost upon me.
Heard in a meeting today with a potential outside vendor: Right now you're driving a go kart, but just got asked to drive in the Indy 500, and you need someone to come in and at least make sure your wheels don't fall off during the first lap. For context, I'm an external consultant and have been asked by my client to sit in on conversations to help vet potential vendors...
I’m not going to deny that sometimes good performers get let go during these cutting seasons but I swear 20% of the staff at any F500 company I’ve worked with is basically useless at best and actively harming the org at worst.
I get that too but these also typically come with hiring freezes or limited or no headcount in times I've witnessed it. Layoffs have to come across departments to share instead of identifying those bottom performers straight up. I also noticed people will convince themselves that some let go are worse than they really were. A way of justifying it mentally I guess. Not that I blame anyone for that. Anyway my point was more about companies are more "agile" with more resources. You cant move quickly when people are overloaded. In my agency life they would talk about a.smaller office as "agile and can move quickly!" Which never made sense since they didn't have bandwidth to do new/more things.
We used to use Webex and never had any problems. After we got bought they tried to shove Skype/GoToMeeting down our throats. We bitched and complained hard enough and got it replaced with Zoom. Seems pretty good so far
Zoom is awesome My only complaint is that when you join meetings, sometimes it automatically turns your webcam on, even if you have restricted application access to your webcam through your operating system
That would be a relief. I've had to interview interns using GTM for the last two weeks and probably spent ten hours troubleshooting the fucking thing.
It has to do with the way you join, I can't remember exactly. Some of the professors at my school use it to broadcast/record lectures. One time this woman didn't realize her webcam was on when she was "attending lecture remotely," so basically it was a live stream of her doing her makeup and shit getting ready to go out for the night. Awkward.
We’re a tech company, but every tech presentation is a shitshow, no matter the platform. It’s amazing.
We had Google, moved to Outlook. The switch was anything but smooth and the platform is awful, comparatively. But the savings were great - except we purchased Slack because Skype sucks, so any savings are likely a wash.
Got asked this morning to develop some new SOPs for naming documents before saving them to our company server....
Zoom is the goat. And there’s a toggle within settings to default keep camera off when you enter a meeting.
I'm a fan of Zoom. We were acquired so our tech stack is changing quite a bit. Going in a bad direction though: Zoom to WebEx Gmail to Outlook Gchat / hangouts to Jabber (awful) Concur to having to book flights/hotels through Concur
Zoom Slack Jira Confluence Workday Anaplan Expensify Salesforce Skilljar Tableau Greenhouse Outlook ...and even others based on department Literally all of the apps
We use slack for just one department and it's actually a link to our regional counterparts. So it's like a side group. For that it works well. Basically a message board for a specific discipline.
The threading is infuriating to me. I hate how the threads collapse and expand. I hate the way "activity" works and how if you check a conversation update you won't see the previous conversation activity, just the message that triggered the alert (so you'll see that most recent message with no included context until you go back into the team). Etc
i have this off and windows configured to ask my permission before using the webcam. it still turns on automatically sometimes. i think it's when i join via a link to the meeting rather than through zoom itself, but it's been a little while since i've used it.
Zoom is the goat. Teams is shit compared to Slack. We loved Slack but they didn’t have a way to track enough of it so they moved us to Teams. I hate it. Expensify is the goat expense platform. I hated concur but expensify is so easy. Fuck Goto and that garbage POS.
Used to also have it on WebEx and then it was updated. Now it doesn't. Also team concur sucks, don't get why sap bought them instead of one that doesn't suck. Jabber is.. Eh it's there.