Leadership is incredibly out of touch with staff — the executive leading the various teams under my function regularly cancels meetings and makes no effort to actually understand the work happening and the people doing it. This, in my opinion, is the core of most of the issues facing CDP and perpetuates a culture of distrust, low accountability, and lack of strategic direction. Leadership seems to know that they should be more engaged and transparent, but only does surface-level things to improve optics, which indicates a lack of respect for staff’s intelligence and expertise.
Because of this lack of collaboration and understanding, all meaningful decisions regarding teams and work processes are left in the hands of executives, with no opportunities for input even at the managerial level. This has led to months of uncertainty on team structure and workflows in the wake of sudden layoffs, breeding resentment at the staff level and disempowering people managers in being able to provide any clarity for their teams. It would be one thing if leadership’s decisions felt informed, but given their lack of engagement, the outcomes of their decisions just create more confusion and chaos.
And on the project level, these mass layoffs have resulted in serious staffing and resource gaps when delivering on contracted work. You’d think that this would have been taken into account when planning for layoffs, but leadership seemed completely unaware of these impacts. So now, some projects are bringing in the expensive consultants to continue this work (some of whom are friends of executives, which is a whole different story). It’s senseless and certainly does not inspire confidence for the staff who are left working on these projects.
Another big issue is the lack of investment in systems for what seems like decades. The HR management platform is something of a bygone era — clunky, confusing, and ineffective for even simple things like tracking PTO, let alone performance management. There is no comprehensive CRM or similar platform to track engagements and projects with various stakeholders, something that should almost be a given for an organization this large in 2025. Individual teams have implemented their own stop-gap solutions or systems to manage work, but there is no cohesion across the organization, leading to low use rates and confusion about where to find information. This is supposedly being addressed but I won’t hold my breath — I’ve heard about similar initiatives over the past several years that have failed.
