Metavante (a data processing facility) and its parent company, Marshall & Ilsley [Bank] Corporation (also known as M&I Corporation or M&I Bank) are poor, unfair and unethical employers. Almost anything is said to get prospective employees to join their company, but once in the door & reality hits you in the face. The long hours, which occasionally are needed, are needed more often than not. Everything is a rush, rush priority. Most managers are poor managers, but good politicians & when their planning (or lack thereof) causes production or relationship problems between departments, it is ALWAYS some regular employee's fault, and they are taken to task rather than the management. Management is much too busy micro-managing their employees than to direct the departments in the overall activities.
(i.E., There have been numerous weeks where our manager called every half a hour for status report updates on a regular project that ran for about four or five weeks. The phone call would take about five minutes with about another ten minutes research to verify issues with all team members for the next status report. The projects were not special or critical projects; they were just regular projects. Also, they were not initially running late until interference by management dragged the project to near stagnation with very little actual work getting accomplished except for constantly reporting to our management. Problems came up which I was not able to resolve myself and ask for our management to assist in their resolution. These problems delayed our timely completion; however, management never made any attempt to resolve the issues.in fact, when we were delayed by these problems, we were criticized because we did not meet our budgeted time. Management did not make any allowance for these, or as I stated, provide any assistance to resolve these.)
Management is very likely to use one of their own employees as a scapegoat for their inaction and mistakes. Our customers are constantly complaining of mistakes, but we are not often given time to correct these mistakes and the customers (as well as the blamed employees) suffer the consequences. The Marketing department states that our retention rate for commercial and institutional customers needs to improve; however, until management focuses more on the customer than the budget, problems in processing and security will continue to occur (and the employees will be blamed for it). We are a regulated industry and I am sure that will all the short-cuts that are being taken, we are not in compliance with all of the security and financial guidelines. So much for the customer! Hey, its only money!
Additionally, (AND THIS IS A VERY BIG ISSUE THAT IS AFFECTING NEARLY EVERYTHING) Metavante was preparing for an IPO to raise capital for our parent company, M&I. A lot (millions of dollars and a lot of internal work and effort) were expended prior to the last minute cancellation of the IPO. Management has been trying to make up the funds that it lost ever since. The first major effort was the lay-off of about 480 employees that were deemed nontechnology-oriented and unnecessary. Since Metavante considers itself to be a technology company, this was a major concern. They received a severance and were able to collect unemployment.
Also, about another 200 employees (in several large waves) were summarily fired for violation of company policies. Nearly all of these incidents involved the personal use of a company credit card. To managements defense, all employees were warned repeatedly against using the card for personal use. However, when the individual situations occurred, the employees where not given notice of the situation and a chance to immediately or otherwise timely resolve this, but summarily fired no matter how little was actually involved. The policy did state that management COULD take any disciplinary action up to and including dismissal, but there has not been any word that anybody who even momentarily violated this policy received anything but dismissal. This was done primarily to further reduce staff and not have to pay any severance or unemployment benefits. The employees were just suddenly left high and dry without any recourse. Also it is interesting to note that no managers were included in any of these dismissals & it is not impossible that managers (who use their company credit cards more often than regular employees) did not have any violators in their numbers, but it certainly seems strange.
We have also noted a significant number of highly productive employees suddenly disappearing. We are later told that they did not meet managements expectations or were unhappy in their jobs. Subsequent conversations with some of them give a very different story. And again, almost none of these disappearances are managers.
There is distinctively developing a large gap between those of us who have been here a long while and those that have only been here a year or two. Many dont last beyond that any more. We get pretty good benefits typically for those of us allowed to stay here for now. However, profit sharing and 401Ks dont mean a whole lot if you are not here long enough to become fully or even marginally vested in these.
One last point, which I will just say is a rumor as of yet, is the fact that MANAGEMENT will be rating all employees every year. However, rather than this rating be used for promotion and bonuses [which have been greatly diminished since the failed IPO], all employees ranked in the lowest 25% of staff productivity will be released annually. If this is true, I am sure this will be quite a motivating factor. What I havent heard is whether or not management will be evaluated in this manner as well. Maybe the unionization of technical workers has finally come to its time. Somebody needs to protect the individual employees from the arbitrary actions of management.
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