Its obvious that the new owners are trying to cut staff numbers, presumably to temporarily boost the profitability of the company's accounts and try to turn around their investment for a short term profit. I sincerely hope they don't get away with it though, with how much damage they've done to the long term viability of what was once a great, market-leading business.
Even leaving aside the widespread redundancies, there's various other obvious attempts to get staff to leave:
- withholding bonuses due to unrealistic sales targets
- witholding even cost of living rises let alone actual pay rises, leading to a ~20% pay decrease over 3 years
- moving us to a city centre office despite their own staff survey finding overwhelming support for staying put in Garforth
The most recent staff survey showed that not one single part of the business is actually 'good' anymore, with the biggest problem being pay. But the follow up call a few weeks later began with 'leaving pay aside...' So what was the point? To just ignore the main problem and waste the entire call talking about things which aren't important by comparison. Just stop bothering with sham surveys! You're only 'engaging' with staff if you actually heed our responses.
This next part comes from over a decade of experience working at what was once Liquidlogic. This is a software business, with a particularly complex product set and historically sales-led development focus. Which to anyone with insight into how a software business works, means that we've left ourselves with increased support requirements going forward. Most software is a combination of well designed core code, augmented over the years with the equivalent of a lot of duct tape and sticking plasters representing rushing out new functionality faster than the competition. And that tape and those plasters keep falling off, requiring additional support and development work compared to an 'average' software business. BUT, this approach made us the market leaders? So clearly its no less 'correct' than any other approach. And our (genuine) surveys over decades past prove that our customers are happier with us than any of the competition. We just need (among other things) to ensure we keep up with our support requirements, and there's no reason we can't providing we adequately invest in enough - and a high enough quality of - support and development staff. But we no longer do. Its as if the powers that be have a manual for how many staff should be in each department of a software business, and lack any insight into what's unique about THIS particular business. Hence we are now woefully under staffed and sinking further every day. The Titanic has nothing on our support department.
And I'm speaking from a place of genuine sadness at the thought of finally leaving this employer after so many years. Sorry as I am to be leaving, the future definitely looks better at any random other software business than this one right now
