I worked under 8 different managers during my 14 years at the company and over half of them had no clue how to manage employees effectively. The hierarchical nature of the company undermined their stated desire that they value their employees. HR is there simply to protect the company from their employees, not to assist actual employees.
Before the economic downturn, employees had some nice perks. When the company started doing better than before the downturn, the management never brought back any of the perks, including the holiday party which morphed from a really nice catered event to a cafeteria lunch. As an administrative assistant, I previously was given a small bonus at the end of the year with all other employees. They took that away also. At one point they had some suit stage a bunch of meetings with the admin staff to find out what would create a better environment for the admins which we all were very excited about and it turned to nothing. They took none of the information we gave them into account. Hugely disappointing and we all felt like we were not an important part of the company at all.
It's a weird kind of big brother feeling there to me where employees are encouraged to report on other employees. You see some employees really cheering on the corporate "mission" and they reminded me of Stepford employees, robot-like in their support of company "values" which have nothing to do with being human beings.
