Over the last 6 years, as revenue and stock price have skyrocketed, even through the pandemic, our CEO goes on CNBC every time we release financial results to talk about how awesome we're doing, how we're leading the market in so many metrics (which we are).
The problem is, every year we get fewer headcount to grow our teams, less money to award for raises, less stock to hand out to top talent as a retention tool. We've recently added forced ranking to employee performance reviews and put a significant downward squeeze on promotions and a complete halt to any off-cycle promotions. Span of control for managers is being hiked from 7 to 10. This represents a MASSIVE disconnect, and it's not sustainable. You can't have both sides of that coin - the company is doing great but we don't have a travel budget. You can't brag about how awesome the firm is doing and be genuine in thanking the employees for their hard work that's getting us there, and then also say "there's no money for raises, promotions, or new headcount, do more with less and be glad we haven't had layoffs." Top execs are absolutely taking advantage of the fact that this is a crap economy which makes it hard for people to leave.
They've basically adopted the Jack Welch curve for performance - forcing managers to score 60% of employees as "middle of the road." Anyone scored above average they now make managers write a book report to justify it. That's not uncommon, and it would work fine at HP or IBM where you expect to be operating inside a corporate bureaucratic beast that treats you like a number. But that's not why people come to ServiceNow. It's ridiculously hard to get into ServiceNow these days because so many people are looking to leave that kind of nonsense. Except, now that nonsense is creeping in here, too. You can't hire the cream of the crop (which we've really worked hard to do) and then tell 60% of them they're "solid, middle of the road" performers. It creates huge dissonance.
