Micro Management Defeats the Team Mindset - Anonymous employee Heuristic Solutions Employee Review

I'm a little suspicious of this post because it is so generic and so one-sided. Most people who have worked here have *something* positive to say (we tend to hire nice people). I have also been in touch with pretty much everyone since their departure, and these seem unlikely comments as a whole. Still, I'm willing to face the possibility that someone I thought was enjoying working here and moved on for whatever reasons was actually deeply unhappy. With respect to the management and cultural issues, we are taking intentional strides to build a coherent culture and nurture ownership in employees' work. It feels like we are getting better and better, which means that the farther in the past one goes, the worse things might have been relative to today. If this is a real comment from a real person, please reach out to me personally. I would love to hear from you about when you were here, what team you were on and other details that might help us understand what made you unhappy. I would appreciate the opportunity to make sure we are not repeating your experience for people who are here. Team ownership and team function is central to the way we work. Most work we do is accountable to a team instead of a person. On the product development team, we operate as a (mostly) agile shop, which doesn't afford a lot of opportunity for micromanagement. Our senior architect breaks down cases to a fairly detailed level, but has no time to hover over each developer. On the implementation side, we give our analysts a good deal of authority to negotiate directly with customers with respect to scope and timing. We have a team that comes together to standardize the way we communicate. Not everyone agrees with the process of standardization, so I can see how that can come across as micromanagement, but that would be team micromanagement rather than a single individual browbeating. On the product management side, we have a team that orchestrates the product road map. We come together as a team to negotiate our various priorities, and while our CIO has ultimate authority, most decisions are made between the implementation analysts and the product development folks. On the sales front, we have a pretty straightforward quantitative model related to the number of calls and contacts that need to be made to achieve sales targets. If targets aren't being met and no one is asking for help, we are going to have a lot more scrutiny over what is going on. I wanted to make a couple of observations about the star ratings. This review shows work life balance as a "1". Unless this was from a long time ago, it seems unlikely that anyone who worked here would rate balance as poor. Most of our company work from home and/or telecommute a significant amount of their time. The norm is for a 40-hour work week, which we believe optimizes balance between productivity and home life. We give lots of flexibility for day-to-day coordination with family responsibilities. On the "culture and values" rating, I would be interested in hearing more about this. Rating culture and values is inherently subjective, as in: are the values bad or is the company not faithful to the values? We are going through a core values exercise that may be addressing a sense of looseness about our culture. We have honed our core values language over the last few years around key concepts: pioneering, acting intentionally, achieving excellence with others, and caring. I think they are pretty good values and while we are not all perfectly in alignment, we are making a lot of effort to infuse our decisions with these values. Thank you for sharing your observations. I hope the progress we are making on team culture is addressing the comments you made. My offer to talk is sincere. We always wish our former employees well and always want to do better.