Back to Affiliated Computer Services Reviews
Affiliated Computer Services – “After working here, the letters of the alphabet you will dislike more than ACS will be HR!”
Pros
Job Security - ACS signs long contracts with its outsourcers, and with a presence in 38 countries... job stability, availability, and transfer options abound.
Resume Booster - Working for a Fortune 500 looks good on a resume
They love Texas - I'm certain that if you work at the Dallas based office, things are great (benefits and pay look really good for that market). This package doesn't really look that good for New Englanders... but that's covered below.
Cons
Corporate stifles the Small Business Unit - Our SBU has some of the best employees and best managers I've ever worked with. However, corporate has a tendancy to step in to apply some Dallas-centric ideals and philosophies that don't translate well into all markets. Raises and bonuses aren't dependent on the functioning of the SBU, but on the success of the corporation as a whole, and this winds up punishing the hardest working employees, and demoralizing their work ethics.
HR has alot of turnover, with no personalized service - When I started, we had a Workplace Partnere, the one guy at HR that could help you find anything you needed. Corporate replaced this with a 1-800 number, and now you are just a number when you call. This allows them to more effectively find reasons to deny qualifying life status changes with regard to benefit enrollment, delay payments to benefit packages by "losing things in the mail", and to make matters worse by making you get lost in a maze of extensions and phone numbers.
No positive feedback, either verbally or monetarily - We work hard all year being told that its a Pay-for-Performance shop, but then when reviews come, the hardest working employees got a 5% pay cut. The company says that the cut was needed to weather the economic storm... which sounds good so long as the company doesn't post comparitively phenomenal Q3 earnings. To make matters worse, they expect us to work more hours for the lesser pay, and we're not even given a Thank You for taking one for the team.
Advice to Senior Management
Your shareholders are important, but the employees make your company succeed. A better long-term management strategy would be to hire and reward talent, and find savings by eliminating needless beurocracy... as opposed to finding savings in your employees' benefits packages.