Survey shows mixed reviews among employees for the company
After a spate of bad news about the Kin flop and trepidation about whether Microsoft’s coming Phone 7 mobile OS will spark sales, the week ends for Microsoft with news of layoffs. A survey of employees, meanwhile, documents discontent in Redmond.
My colleague Julie Bort writes today about layoffs in the “hundreds,” although the company hasn’t filed formal notice with the SEC or revealed a specific number of people being let go. She notes the layoffs come less than two weeks before the July 22 release of its financial results for the fiscal year ended June 30.
From a global workforce of 88,180, that’s a tiny cutback, much smaller than the 5,800 headcount reduction in 2009. But in the context of the Edsel-like Kin debacle and the May shakeup in the gaming and devices market, which includes smartphones, the interest in tea leaf-reading is strong.
One nice collection of tea leaves can be found at Glassdoor.com, a site that profiles 84,000 companies, including posting employee ratings of their employer and anonymously shared comments. On the Microsoft page, 1,356 employees who chimed in gave the company a 3.5 rating out of 5 points and gave CEO Steve Ballmer a 52 percent approval rating. Hey, any President of the United States would love to have a 52 percent approval rating.
A review of the comments, where people list pros and cons or working at Microsoft, shows a mix of Kool-Aid drinkers and, oh, let’s say, Castor oil drinkers. Or realists, depending on your perspective.
On the bright side were these comments: “Growth opportunities, transparency of vision, passion to be great;” “Absolute industry juggernaut;” “Great benefits, Great perks;” and “Everyone is truly exceptional.”
But even some of the pros comments are qualified. Microsoft employs “smart people who are generally really nice to work with and by and large highly motivated,” wrote one. Another snarkily praised the level of job security: “It is a place where people can hide for years.” But when they discuss the cons of working at Microsoft, the criticism can’t always be explained away by cynicism or what one former employer of mine dismissed as “malcontents.”
Many of them lament that the company has become bureaucratic, lacks a strategic vision and that they have lost confidence in the leadership of top management. To be sure, a 35-year old public company ringing up $62 billion in sales and employing tens of thousands of people is going to be bureaucratic. Still for those who remember a feisty startup that basically created the age of the personal computer, the image of a plodding bureaucratic oil tanker — as opposed to a juggernaut — has got to be disheartening.
“Microsoft leadership has been in a downward slide for the last five or so years,” writes one worker who complained that mid-upper management people can’t effectively act. “The amount of politics involved in decision making gets more extreme every year.”
Employees were also invited to make suggestions to senior management. One writer’s advice: “Bring in some empowered VP level folks with a strong sense of vision and wipe out a good chunk of the partner level population.” Another suggested Microsoft just focus on Windows, Office and Xbox, understandable since those are currently the company’s hottest products. Windows 7 OS is clearly a strong seller, Office 2010 has enjoyed positive reviews and Xbox Live is forecast to generate $1 billion in revenue this year. But Microsoft’s mobile business is to me conspicuous by its absence from that employee’s list of core products. You can’t be a tech leader in today’s world without competing in the mobile space.
Just for comparison’s sake, I checked Glassdoor’s ranking for other major tech companies:
- Google: 3.9 out of 5 and 97 percent approval for CEO Eric Schmidt.
- Apple: 3.8 and 98 percent love for Steve Jobs (Apple probably knows how everyone voted).
- Oracle: 3.1 and 79 percent approval for Larry Ellison
Microsoft can take comfort only in the results from Hewlett-Packard: A 2.5 rating and 34 percent approval for chairman and CEO Mark Hurd.
What’s up with that?
