Oracle

Oracle is still a good brand for your resume.

Oracle has some really effective products and continues to invest in them.

Oracle will pay for outside education related to your job function.

Very high voluntary termination rate.

Huge focus on corporate administrative tasks at the expense of productivity and clients.

Disingenuous client billing.

Complete lack of respect by OMC leaders for team members as individuals.

Absence of recognition and rewards for high performance.

Expectation of employees to work more than 40 hours without billing overtime.

Almost zero team-building or team events.

Leadership is all but absent – not hands-on or involved at all with employees.

Leadership has demanded that people leaving disclose their new employer name upon giving notice.

Use of negative reinforcement rather than positive reinforcement as motivation.

General lack of raises.

In the case of commission-eligible employees, bonuses have been paid up to a year late.

Commission goals have been assigned in some cases after the commission period was over, effectively allowing Oracle to back into the number and deciding the final commission after the fact.

The discretionary bonus fund for recognizing performance has been zero for the second quarter running.

The current OMC Consulting leadership appears to be focused only on meeting revenue goals, and at any cost. They are losing great talent because they are not focusing on what motivates talent to stay and drive for success. Motivation is in the form of fear and threats; for example, it has been said that if you miss a time card, you cannot be promoted.

Oracle also appears to be putting itself before its clients, instituting arguably disingenuous billing practices in an attempt to make more employees "chargeable." This in some cases seems to have resulted in clients paying considerably more for the same amount of work than they used to, and than they expected under their agreement.

My advice to Oracle would be as follows:

• Remove the current leaders of OMC Consulting and put in place leaders with at least some emotional intelligence who will focus on employees, clients, and simplification of process.
• Enable employees to perform their real purpose (which is to drive customer success) and minimize the distraction of internal overhead.
• Motivate employees with recognition for their efforts to support clients, not with fear that bad things will happen to them if they fail to perform any of the increasingly numerous and onerous administrative tasks being put in place to document and justify their activity.
• (For commissioned employees) Clearly outline commission plans (exact goals, deadlines, and payout dates) before the period in which the commissions are earned, and pay them prior to the payout date.

Don't just say that you care about your employees; act as though you care about them by showing them that you do. Meet with them, take time to show them that they are valued. Most of them join because they want to excel in their role; they enjoy coding, or designing, or building campaigns, or strategizing, or managing teams, so they want to do well at these things and believe that they will have the opportunity to do so at Oracle. Let them do so by supporting their advancement in their roles and stop taking away their opportunity to do so by forcing them to spend excessive time on complicated time cards and approval requests for trivial matters.

Oracle has amazing products that virtually sell themselves. Support your employees in their quest to be great employees who keep your clients happy, and you will retain and attract more great talent and more great clients. This is not hard to do; Salesforce and Adobe manage to do it.

It could be that Oracle's overall leadership thinks it's happening, but it's not. There is a cancer of unhappiness and discontent in the mid-levels that is spreading insidiously, and unless stopped, it will result in Oracle Consulting being mediocre at best.