CSC Employees: Don't Forget About Us In Turnaround

Turning the business aspects of a company around is hard enough, but getting the employees on board can sometimes be an even bigger challenge.

That has been especially evident at CSC as the company navigates a multiyear transformation under CEO Mike Lawrie to a profitable company focused on delivering next-generation solutions around cloud, security and big data and analytics.

While CSC has seen some success pleasing Wall Street with improving margins, the company has struggled to keep up employee morale, according to anonymous company review site Glassdoor. Here are some statistics from reviews of the company on Glassdoor:

[Related: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly: CEO Mike Lawrie Faces Challenge Of Transforming CSC]

Reviewers gave CSC an overall approval rating of 2.7 out of 5. This number is an average rating from 3,168 former and current employees on Glassdoor. Reviewers scored the company on:

- Culture and values (2.6)

- Work/life balance (3.1)

- Senior management (2.2)

- Compensation and benefits (2.7)

- Career opportunities (2.6)

Some 36 percent of reviewers would recommend CSC to a friend. This is down from more than 60 percent in 2012.

CSC's CEO approval rating is 38 percent, down from almost 80 percent in 2012. Lawrie took the helm in March of that year.

Some 17 percent of reviewers said CSC has a "positive" business.

For comparison, one of CSC's main competitors, Accenture, has a 3.6 out of 5 rating on the site, with an 89 percent approval rating for CEO Pierre Nanterme and 78 percent saying they would recommend the company to a friend.

"The Glassdoor [metrics] raises a much larger cultural issue," said Gard Little, an IDC research director who covers CSC. "My suspicion is that social media has a very significant input, so part of this turnaround is changing the culture. Going from 14 layers of management to seven, that is a huge cultural shift. Those things take time to play out. I think management and a significantly flatter organizational structure will make whatever the blocks were much more apparent and make decisions happen much more rapidly."

Both current and former employees agreed in their reviews that the transition has been tough on them, with multiple rounds of layoffs and cost cuts putting employee morale at an "all-time low," according to Glassdoor.

"There is an urgent need to boost morale across the company. ... In order to start growing again, [senior management] needs to stabilize the company, set the strategy and stick to it and deliver before making yet another change. [Management] has not only an obligation to show positive results on Wall Street, but to its employees first who actually make the achievement of those results possible," a current employee wrote on Glassdoor.

Employees in their reviews said poor communication from senior-level management left a feeling of general uncertainty across the company, especially in the wake of layoffs and changing management structures. There were multiple criticisms of a lack of bonuses and raises for the last three to five years.

"I'd challenge every manager at CSC to view yourself as a servant to your employees, not as a domineering taskmaster," one current employee of the company wrote. "You'd see a completely different change and fierce loyalty from your employees. CSC could be great again, but not until the 'managers know best' mentality is gone."

"Need to transition back to more of the CSC of old and start treating employees as an asset instead of a liability," another current employee wrote.

The reviews weren't all negative, however. Employees on Glassdoor praised the interesting contracts and projects, as well as brand-name recognition and decent pay that CSC brings to the table.

CRN reached out to CSC, requesting comment from the company or CEO Lawrie, but did not hear back after multiple requests by phone and email.

If the Glassdoor reviews accurately reflect what's going on inside the company, CSC wouldn't be the first, or the last, company to struggle with company culture during a transformation. Company culture is often the area that suffers the most during a business transformation, causing 75 percent of company change efforts to fail, said Lisa Jackson, principal of Corporate Culture Pros, a culture and business performance consultant group that has worked with big-name companies such as AT&T, Avaya, Xerox, Sprint and more. While Jackson hasn't evaluated CSC individually, she said culture transformation is a problem she sees again and again.

"That's more and more common that organizations are undertaking massive business transformations. ... We're looking at competitive markets shifting more quickly than ever before and in the face of that, people are trying to respond with traditional change management and it's not working because you have outdated management practices," Jackson said.

While culture can often seem to be a "fluffy" conversation, she said, it drives real-life business performance effects that can hinder growth. To prevent growth drops, Jackson said an organization needs first to develop clarity across the whole business around how it perceives success. Second, the company needs to give employees input into strategy to build excitement and engagement. Finally, Jackson said companies need to bring the customer views into the strategy as well by talking to employees at the customer-facing pieces of the organization.

China Gorman, CEO of Great Place to Work, a global human resources consulting, research and training firm, agreed, saying management transparency is key during company transformations.

"If management is unable to communicate why transformation is needed, how it will be achieved and its potential outcomes, employees may feel excluded from the decision-making process. They may also become uncomfortable with the ambiguity of this process and have difficulty linking the changes made to the overall mission and goals of the organization. In contrast, if the organization is able to handle the transformation in an open and honest way, management will more easily be able to align their teams to focus on innovation and growth," Gorman said.

As a company gets larger, the challenge gets greater, Jackson said. For a 10,000-employee company, she estimated the transformation would take five years, start to finish. CSC has 72,000 employees, according to the company website. Gorman said having more employees raises the amount of decision-makers and employees that need to work together for a common goal. While not impossible, Jackson said the transformation of a larger company culture takes a strong-willed CEO, citing Lou Gerstner and the IBM turnaround as an example. However, it can be accomplished at any phase of the transformation, even one that has been under way for a while like CSC's, she said.

"There will still be a bunch of people who don't care, but the people who do care about the future of the organization are there because they want it to be better. ... If you draw on their heart and engage their heart in this -- that's magic," Jackson said.

Analysts agreed, saying that they have seen culture as a challenge again and again.

"I would say that any company that is going through a transition, the culture is going to go through a transition," said Jacob Gordon, research analyst who covers CSC at Technology Business Research. "I think CSC is not the only one experiencing this. ... It"s difficult to go through a change like that."

Despite the challenge, some employees commenting on Glassdoor remained optimistic that their current troubles would lead to a positive outcome.

"The current financial transformation could pay off very well for employees in the future, but it has been a very lengthy and seemingly never-ending transformation," one current employee of more than five years wrote on Glassdoor.

This article originally appeared as an exclusive on the CRN Tech News App for iOS and Windows 8.

PUBLISHED MARCH 9, 2015