Pros

Before HFS was taken over by M & F worldwide (Holding Company), it was actually a pretty good place to work. There was a decent work environment and opportunity. Over the past couple years, however, things have made a drastic downturn.

Cons

During the past couple of years and to the point of this post, things have been getting progressively worse at HFS. The company is in big trouble in keeping up with sales needs and certainly cannot support or implement what they do have. Customer satisfaction is at an all time low.

HFS has continued to downsize heavily for the past year or so. This has forced employees who already have a bad work/life balance to take on much more. When changes are made, annoucements rarely go out to employees. I had to find out that a colleague had been let go from the company from one of our customers because there was no internal communication. Now, employees are all looking at each other with very wide eyes, hoping they have a job tomorrow. Many are doing what they can to start searching outside the company, and few are talking about continuing their career within HFS.

This is much more that just am effect of the economy or the industry. It boils down to a company that grew too fast (something like 13 acquisitions in the last 5 years), and now they are scrambling to make it work. A lot of jobs are continuing to be rationalized (cut).

HFS has sadly lost sight of their customer's best interests. I have worked in sales for HFS and it is very, very hard to find any customers that are willing to give us a reference anymore. The implementation and support of the product very rarely meets the expectations set out from the sale. I interface with customers everyday, and they are overwhelmingly unhappy about HFS. Many are looking to other providers.

Another compounding issue is that HFS is appearing to belive its own hype. The perfect example is the flat out arrogance of the senior management who claim that customers would be hard pressed to find a better solution at a better price. (Which is certainly not true at all). The absolute arrogance and inability of senior management to understand what is really going on in the day to day workings of the company as well as their failure to have a true perception of HFS from our customers is astonishing. And yet, we continue to cut staff and consolidate responsibilities to the point where we are now; people are working just hard enoung just to survive, there is great employee apathy, and the customers escalation are not only falling on deaf ears, they are becoming noise simply because of the shear volume of complaints and escalations.

What was once a decent company has turned into a sad shell of what used to be. Customers and employees are both leaving.

Advice to Senior Management

The more that time goes by, the more that senior management appear to be taking orders from the holding company (M & F Worldwide). It is very clear to anyone working at the VP level and down at HFS that senior management has just about completely lost touch with what is actually going on (as I mentioned above). My advice to senior management is to listen very carefully to the employees. Just about all of the "governing" of the company appears to be done with little regard for input given from employees doing the day to day work with the customers, and instead is being dreamed up in an isolated world of theory. And maybe an in-person visit once in a while (the company isn't really that big). There is a hige divide between what senior management is communicating down to the employees and what they employees know is actually going on.

Many changes that we have been trying to make for literally years now are still "in progress" or are shelved. We have been telling employees for literally years that they are going to have certain functionality which our competition has now, and they still don't have it. Our customer's new expectation of HFS is to be let down on anything promised, even promises in writing.