IBM – “IBM is massive. Individuals' experience solely depends on the direct line manager.”

Pros

- Investment in individual's learning and growth
- Flexi hours
- Well-known brand name
- Work/life balance with options to work from home

Cons

- Management's lack of visibility of individual's achievement. It's entirely dependant on the individual to promote one's good work and positive feedback from customer. There's no fair system to track individuals KPIs
- lack of recognition for top performers
- very few promotion opportunities
- cumbersome administrative process for almost all back end functions, but it's improving over time. For instance the reimbursement system has now become online interaction.
- infrastructure's appalling including internal system, hardware, premise have virtually not upgraded
- Operational model is cumbersome and is commented as a waste of time by my customer. Constructive feedback is not acted upon and being totally ignored by management. There're lots of loopholes and redundant steps in the process that doesn't add any value but being counter-productive.
- Too many layers of middle management that adds no value to the business unit at all. Management's work is not transparent and there's no visibility of their roles' responsibilties. Neither is there any visible results of their work at all. front-line professionals are over-worked whereas mid-layer management's slack attitude not only eats away others well-fare but also an obstacle to get things rolling ahead.
- Lack of motive-recognition-reward model.

Advice to Senior Management

Management needs to value people as assets and recognize top performers by implementing a "motivate-recognize-reward" model to retain good people. IBM takes pride in investing in people. Truely that management's support and investment in individual's development and growth is across the organization. However, once ambitious people acquire more valuable skills, there's little room for them to shine in terms of moving vertically up one ladder or horizontally across teams. The compensation is not aligned to individual's market value. It's not a smart strategy to invest in IBMers only to find the best talents' gone to work for other companies.