The current leadership team simply don't care for their staff or their views. We were recently given a 2% pay rise on our base pay. But people in receipt of "digital, data and technology allowances" (nearly everyone working on anything technical at GDS) actually received a take home pay drop of between £10 and £100 per month. This was backdated by one month, so people were £20 to £200 worse off that month. No notice was given of this drop and management failed to acknowledge it until days after payslips came out and staff complained. This was over 4 weeks ago and there is still no solution. We were told we'd get weekly updates, but these never happened. We were recently told too many people were getting "exceeded" in their end-of-year reviews and this would need to be made more consistent with the rest of the Cabinet Office. Rather than looking into why (i.e. have GDS just got some really high performing specialists), they appear to be suggesting they'll just downgrade people. This affects their annual pay award (bonus). Returning to the office was on the basis of "because we (the management) said so" rather than providing any actual reason for requiring us in the office. With teams now split between Bristol, London and Manchester, there will always be remote people in meetings anyway, so the arguments don't hold together. When someone suggested these issues would increase staff turnover (and we already have issues recruiting for many roles), we were told this was good as we needed new views. The current management appear not to like that many staff have far more experience in the organisation than they do.
