I worked for a company acquired by TELUS to build out TELUS Agriculture. TELUS started with big plans and said all the right things, those of us who had been with the acquired companies for 10-20 years were actually excited about the possibilities. The people from all the acquired companies were top talent.
However, the end result was a disaster. TELUS does not listen to anybody with domain knowledge, does not care about their employees, and does not seem to actually care about anything other than the bottom line. Ironically, their mishandling of the M&A has led to a near 35% turnover rate, with almost nobody at the companies left who has been there longer than 3-5 years.
Avoid this company at all costs.
1. Salaries and benefits - salaries were largely frozen, only 1-2% raises were given each year. Benefits go worse. Less PTO, worse and more expensive insurance, etc.
2. Too much work, not enough hiring - TELUS spent two years telling us we couldn't hire anybody, but at the same time added aggressive integration projects to everybody's workloads, with no new help and no adjustments in deadlines of other projects.
3. Does not listen to internal IT - TELUS forced large company-wide platform changes that made no sense. For example, 90% of acquired companies used Office 365. TELUS forced the entire organization to switch to Google Workspace. This makes no strategic sense. There's no cost benefit because we had to add other platforms, Slack and Salesforce, to make up for the fact that Google does less than Office. There was little domain knowledge of Google's offerings. IT had to retrain and take on a large migration, when going the other direction would have been simpler and less expensive.
4. Does not listen to internal domain experts - nearly all "Ag" employees have left because TELUS would not listen to them. Whether they were in sales, marketing, customer relations, TELUS does not understand the Ag space and does not seem to care to understand. Ag is a very relationship driven industry. You can't enter as an outsider and expect to win much business.
5. Toxic culture - The TELUS culture is to not tell the truth and to blame others. Example: if you tell TELUS that a project will realistically take 6 months, they tell you to finish it in 3. If you tell them you cannot because 6 months is an accurate estimate, they do not listen. The same is true for cost. The only way around this is to lie. You tell them it takes 12 months, then say 6. This is very old school managerial thinking. It's employee antagonistic. It breeds mistrust and cynicism. It's no way to manage a department. As for the blame others part, well if something goes wrong, it's the employees' fault. If it goes right, it's the vision of those at the top. Again, old school thinking. I was a D level manager. I had three management tiers below me. I never operated this way before and could not get those on top of me to listen.
6. Does not listen to employees - as employee dissatisfaction increased (all the above and more), they kicked off an effort to address it, a so-called "stabilization" effort. When that concluded, their takeaway was not to address employee issues of trust, culture, toxicity, overload, etc., but to instead redesign the applications. Basically their conclusion was to add more work. Nobody really understood why and management's poor handling of this situation led to a massive departure at all levels in early 2022.
