Booking.com

Office lunches are amazing.

Colleagues are usually helpful.

The head office campus promises to be quite fantastic.

Trust in leadership is at an all-time low after a series of layoffs and walking back on previous promises not to do any more layoffs.

Instead of outright layoffs, they have sold the support department to Majorel. For those who wish to remain, they will need to relocate to another city or country, which is essentially a delayed layoff. Worse, no severance will be paid unless employees remain at Majorel for six months, even if there is no option to continue working after the initial six months.

Tech strategy is unclear, and outages are frequent. Documentation is often scant, with old-timers relying on memory for how things work.

Overall, this company is chaotic and unorganized. Despite trying to transition from a startup mentality some years back, it's a wonder anything gets done here. The culture is shifting to a more extreme, profit-driven model with a shift to more contractors and outsourced staff for greater financial flexibility in case a recession hits.

Year after year, the annual surveys reflect a lack of trust in leadership, but nothing changes. AMAs are completely unhelpful as no answers are given.

If you want to stop high turnover and improve morale, try listening to your employees. The company makes billions annually despite low travel and bookings. Why do you need to act as if we are always in the red each year?

Please invest in your workers instead of pleasing the shareholders all the time.