Where do I even begin? When I first joined, the company had an amazing culture, with most employees taking pride in their work and going the extra mile to ensure the company's success. Don’t get me wrong, it had plenty of issues such as a lack of processes, a very inefficient network build program, and several managers whose role had outgrown them. So, when new leadership took over, there was genuine excitement that, with the right direction, we could transform the company into a huge success. Sadly, reality turned out to be quite different.
The new CEO initially seemed promising, making numerous commitments ranging from companywide salary increases to network/system/process improvements and more. Unfortunately, this leadership team made overpromising and underdelivering their trademark. Next, an influx of ex Openreach staff arrived, individuals the leadership had worked with before. This wasn’t an issue in itself and in many cases they did bring much needed expertise to the business, but the treatment they received differed significantly from that of the existing staff. Existing employees were either ignored, isolated, or pushed out (I’m talking about the good ones!), while the newcomers were given trust, support, and opportunities to excel. While this support for the new hires was great (I have nothing against them), it came at the expense of those who had put in so much effort to build GN. As a result, organisational knowledge flooded out of the business, but the leadership’s arrogance prevented them from understanding the consequences.
It appears that much of the leadership team came from larger organisations and believed that fixing little ol G.Network would be easy. However, it turns out that without the mountains of corporate infrastructure they were used to, they fell short. We heard about the same plan for nearly a year, each time they repeated it like it was something new, but they never seemed to make any progress. Then came the redundancies. Just as we expected progress to begin, we were informed that around 200 people, nearly a third of the company, would be made redundant. Teams were cut without apparent consideration of how we would achieve our goals. Then after telling us, they weren’t planning on making any more redundancies, they immediately made some more (you can’t make this up, right!)
Morale has hit rock bottom, and those who are still with the company are actively looking to leave. The culture is shocking, and there is no plan to care for, attract, or retain our staff. HR leadership is now non-existent, unless you count the roll out of a school timetable, sorry I mean "Smart Working Rota". The company is now an absolute joke, but it could have been so different. If the leadership had recognised the good within GN and used their experience to improve it, rather than destroy everything and try to rebuild it (failing massively in the process), the story may have been very different….
