Pros
S3 boasts about its culture and rightfully so. Internally, the culture is tight-knit and friendly. The company treats its employees very well with fair compensation, generous incentives, and exciting rewards. I truly believe they are committed to providing quality services to their credit union consortium and, overall, uphold their established values outwardly with a focus on customers and service.
Kontras
Before completing my in-processing, I was inundated with tasks outside my prescribed role. "Asks" came from outside established channels, with little clarity on deadlines or end state, and priorities were unspoken or assumed.
My 1:1s were often hijacked to discuss break-fixes or ad hoc requests, with additional team members invited in and thereby granted access to my individual counseling transcripts. Oftentimes, the scheduled discussions wouldn't even take place. Later, subsequent meetings would pop up on my calendar. I would prepare for a collaborative session, assuming we would pick up where we'd left off, only to discover the expectation was a final product.
One such example began when I asked why the BI team was sending a list of dashboards modified to the CEO on a weekly basis instead of recording and reporting KPI's and strategic impacts. This question spun everything out of control. I was tasked with creating a proposed replacement, later told it wasn't a priority, and then criticized for not having a completed product ready to present in a meeting I didn't schedule. When I tried to explain it was merely an observation and the long-term goal of replacement would require establishing baseline KPIs and a system to record them, I was silenced and scolded.
Somewhere in the chaos, I missed an email. When I raised concerns about bandwidth with my director, expressing my confusion and frustration with the state of communication, I was berated, told the entire team could not be re-engineered to meet my needs, and then passed off to an assistant for a lesson on how to make a to-do list. I came from a very successful career where mistakes had mortal consequences, far more impactful than a delayed email response. This pattern of being consistently blown off, misunderstood, and then berated and condescended to was highly offensive and unprofessional.
I humbled myself, licked my wounds, and provided an update on the pending tasks, most of which were already complete or would be soon. Bearing in mind I'd been asked to evaluate processes, workflows, and systems with a fresh perspective upon being hired, I took the opportunity to include some observations: My team was task-saturated and stressed. The department operated with zero established data governance across multiple disparate communication channels. There were no systems in place to record and measure productivity. The persistent cancellation, rescheduling, and changed scope of meetings were chaotic and dysfunctional. I proposed scaling back the meetings to a pace I'd already discussed with my team as sustainable in their current headspace.
My observations were not well received. There was no acknowledgment of my updates, and all subsequent communication was completely ignored for 4 days before I was fired with no explanation.
I was handed off to HR, whose treatment of me changed markedly from prior interactions, becoming hostile and critical of my performance. Just a week prior, I'd presented a report to the same, which was met with high interest and gratitude. I asked if they had an issue with my performance now, and the story had changed to frequent delays, and not at all what they were looking for. I requested copies of any written counseling sessions, warnings, or performance improvement plans leading to this performance-based termination, and was informed the company does not release those documents after termination.
