Retired 3 years ago and mostly don’t give much thought to my old company. On the occasions I do find myself almost instantly going back to things that frustrated me then. I would like to reflect back on the friendships and great relationships built over those years, I would enjoy reflecting back on the challenges and accomplishments of my career but all of them are tarnished with some kind of frustration attached to them. I really thought very highly and still do of the company I just left but from my level it was painfully evident that this company had all the great programs in the world with absolutely no effective strategy for implementing them. We spent far too much time making numbers right and losing out on all the valuable managing information we could be getting by just using good cost analysis methods.
Time that could be invested into training employees had to be accounted for with insufficient allowances for training. We ended up spending time finding busy jobs and somewhere to stay out of sight. I could go and on like a lot of us could. But is it really worth it?
How would you published the letter? Email the company CEO? A list server email to everybody? Hand it to your boss as you leave the farewell retirement party? Give copies to a few close coworkers?
Off hand I don’t see this ending well. But I’m not sure what you’ve got planned.
I planned to send it to the corpaorate headquarters anonomously, not name any branch.
Then the chances are that it will be dismissed before they have read to the end.
It probably is not worth it. If you want to make changes, you need to build a relationship with someone who has the power to make them (easier now that you’re out of the system) and set yourself up as the Voice of Experience. Good leadership will listen to you, but you’ll probably have to invest time in building a social relationship first. Nobody listens to anonymous letters.
If you were a highly valued employee and management still consults you on occasion to get your perspective, then I could see a critical review from you carrying some weight.
But honestly, three years a long time. Different managers may have come and gone. There may have been drastic reorganization since you left, as well as changes in the strategic plan that you don’t know about.
Your criticisms may be 100% on point. But from the perspective of whomever reads your letter, you’re just rehashing ancient history. Or you may come off looking like an overly self-important guy who doesn’t know how to get out of the game and just enjoy his retirement.
I think I was just blowing off steam. Every once in a while it tends to stick in my craw, within an hour so it disappears.
[ol][li] Write your letter.[/li][li] Print out a copy, and sit on it for a week while thinking about it.[/li][li] Then review your letter, re-edit as needed to make it as indiscreet and intemperate as you can, for maximal effect. Why waste the effort on anything less?[/li][li] Repeat steps 2 and 3 as needed, as your letter asymptotically approaches perfection.[/li][li] Send to all important people in your former company, and perhaps the entire company too. (You did take a copy of the entire company mailing list with you, yes?)[/li][li] Post to Facebook and Reddit.[/li][li] Post to this thread too, of course! :-)[/ol][/li]Do anything less, and you’re settling for something less.
Make your letter be all it can be!
ETA: Oh, and how could I forget: NAME NAMES!
I feel like you were reading my mind!
Having been employed at several companies who conducted employee surveys, my rather cynical observation is that if a company doesn’t listen to its current employees, it’s not going to listen to its former employees.
Years ago I left a company, under my own steam, for a better opportunity. I thought the director I worked under - three levels above me - had a pretty good opinion of me and I had a pretty good opinion of him, so I wrote that letter. I heard nothing back and didn’t talk to my old coworkers - until about two years later when I ran into one at a conference.
Several of my suggestions had come to pass. The two people I spoke highly of in my letter and said they were being underutilized had been promoted. The one person I said was getting too much credit due to the corporate popularity contest and a manager who liked him had been let go. Some of the organizational changes I suggested had been made. All this happened about six months after I left, and the person I talked to had been impressed with the improvements management had made. I did not mention my letter.
Could have been coincidence - if you were at the bottom the suggestions I made and gossip I passed on were pretty obvious. But, the thing I’ve learned being three levels up since then is that each level of management is like looking through a hazy filter- and its less obvious. And sometimes, what’s obvious at the bottom is a stupid idea further up - but sometimes, you just can’t see through those filters.
But I sent the letter two weeks after I left. A couple of years and things have changed too much.
Dangerosa, I think you hit both of the necessary conditions: you’ve got to have an ‘in’ with someone a few levels up who values your opinion, and you’ve got to write and send the letter while your advice is still current.
For the OP: three years is a hell of a long time in an organization these days. At my own shop, very little that I would have been inspired to write in 2011 would have much applicability now.
Write up the letter for yourself if you are sufficiently motivated, but unless your mailbox is hooked up to a time machine, don’t bother sending it.
If I had felt that any of the companies I left remembered my name five minutes after I walked out the door, I might have been interested in doing things like this, too. As mentioned above, if they’re not already contacting you for advice & commentary, this would go straight to the circular file. Even if you had brought these things up at an exit interview, when you were still on the company dime, it might have gotten lost in the shuffle.
That is the reality of the situation, I find as each year goes by I am contacted for advice less and less, each time they do call they always tell me my job is still open if I decide to come back which feels good. I have always viewed a job they way I view a machine or truck that I am responsible for fixing. I feel like a company is just like a machine and should run smoothly and quietly with very few hic ups. When it comes time to leave there is that nagging feeling that I left a machine not properly tuned.
Our particular branch was considered a model branch at the very highest level of performance year in and year out for 25 years. I should be satisfies with that but when I see how much we were doing wrong and still able to maintain that status it makes me ownder how bad the rest of the company must be doing even though they are a leader in the indusrty. It really is sad how poor performance of companies is in general regardless of how well they compare to others.
I worked for a company in the Fortune 100 for almost 5 years. Our entire building housed multiple departments that were almost all badly-managed, the employees were overworked and under-listened to, it could have been way more efficient/profitable if it had just done __________ better, blahblahblah.
This is totally normal. I was indignant at first, but came to realize that companies are run by people and people are flawed on an individual level. And in large groups, those flaws are magnified by each individual’s inability to communicate perfectly and/or come to a consensus. So the group cobbles a system together as best they can, and !for god’s sake! nobody wants to change anything unless it breaks–because who knows if that’s the thing making them so successful? (or what if that thing making us successful depends on this other thing that depends on something else that depends on what we’re changing??)
^That (I believe) is most corporations in a nutshell. We just don’t realize it because nobody can work everywhere, or even at most places. We think “oh it’s just my company having these problems, woe is us, rats on a sinking ship” but really, it’s endemic. Their hearts will go on, and the company will likely remain in business for the next manysome years.
It’s been my experience that companies with good practices and high levels of innovation tend to be small. They don’t become industry leaders, either because that isn’t their aim or because they get sold to a monolith. They’re not as profitable as the industry leaders, because they don’t care as much about profits as something else–whether that’s being at the forefront of technology, or community pride, or treating their workers as best as possible (or whatever). Yeah every company wants to make money, but some want to make it more than others. Not every company wants to screw their employees on benefits/wages to turn a better profit, although that’s a commonly-cut corner.
My last CEO would have sold his grandma for a buck-fifty and slept like a baby that night. My current employer is far from perfect, but has a community focus. Reputation and charity both supersede profits. While profits certainly aren’t of zero importance, they aren’t a priority like they were at my last job (still, our profits **aren’t **bad). And this is a damn great place to work. I’d never heard of it until I moved here. It’s not the cheapest business to work with, and will never lead our industry or any other. There have been lots of opportunities to sell out, but nobody ever has.
Shareholders suck. People are human, and also suck. The companies we put together suck, but they’re probably better than banging rocks together in caves. I’d just let it go, if I were you.