AT&T

Dynamic industry with frequent change and lots of innovation.

Plenty of challenging job opportunities in IT-related fields.

Excellent values and ethics.

The company is well-positioned with its 2020 transformation goals, such as going all IP.

Some managers allow telecommuting, either part- or full-time.

Decent benefits for a large company.

Effective communication and collaboration among employees, and even with executives at times, are facilitated through:

• Employee surveys (followed by real change!)
• The Virtual Management Summit (a combination of discussions with execs and business training from outside experts)
• Internal social and crowd-sourcing platforms

Employee diversity in all its forms is truly valued and respected.

As mentioned in other reviews, there are too many employees hanging onto their jobs who have lost passion, are sometimes incompetent for their assigned role, and are just waiting for retirement.

Cost cutting has gone so far in some organizations that it takes months to hire new employees. We sometimes can't afford the best people, and it's impossible to get in-depth technical training.

Too many managers are reluctant to adopt modern work practices, such as telecommuting and collaboration/social business tools.

While there are many internal job openings, it's difficult to assess what they're about, since most hiring managers use templates for each job title (and title is largely meaningless).

The vast majority of openings are location-specific, which does not jive with the company's push towards location- and time-agnostic work styles.

It's too cumbersome to get mundane things done, such as acquiring office supplies.

Even after several years at AT&T, I still feel uncomfortable with the distinctions between union employees and management (I'm a non-supervisory "manager").

Identify and remove the dead weight (incompetent employees), keep tearing down the bureaucracy so that we can do our jobs, don't cut costs to the point that we can't hire the right people or get training, and continue to shift the culture to one that embraces our distributed workforce with policies and tools that support location/time-agnostic work.