Increasing focus on tech implementation, with a declining focus on advisory, quality of work, and firm culture. - Management Consultant Capco Employee Review

The most significant issues plaguing the firm right now include deteriorating culture, declining quality of work, and mismanaged expectations. Your quality of life will suffer here: 1) Our salary raises are consistently lower than inflationary increases and determined with minimal input from us. You will have to fight tooth and nail to have this increased post-round tables, while being labeled a flight risk in the process. The talent retention policy is also similarly weak, offering too little, too late. 2) Our bonuses are also mediocre relative to industry peers, though leadership will deny this, indicating that we are at the top of our peer group. What peer group are we talking about? Wipro, Tata, and Infosys? Because that's where we are headed. 3) Eating hours is expected. Working hours almost always exceed your allotted billable hours with nowhere to log this extra time. You will not be compensated or rewarded for this overtime, while round table comparisons with peers on lighter projects will be similarly weighted to yourself. 4) Your mental health will deteriorate when continually bullied by toxic project managers. The upward feedback mechanism is useless, with feedback being unable to be reported truly anonymously since project teams are so small. Often your best bet is sending your feedback directly to their coach, though this is still risky since many coaching relationships are quite informal, so the anonymity of your direct feedback may be compromised. Also, going straight to HR has proven to be useless and often detrimental to peers who have attempted this. 5) Abusive project managers punish team members who go to resourcing to escape projects that are detrimental to their career or mental health. These same project managers deny those of us with families to manage our commitments in the evenings, especially when working for a younger or single workstream lead with no frame of reference. 6) Projects are often understaffed or on short timelines to allow the firm to be able to offer a lower cost than our peers. Project managers are afraid to push back on Partner expectations, and proceed to put the burden of work on the rest of us who have limited input on pushing back on project scope as it is being defined. The majority of the Partners are hands off and have not done actual project work in a long time, resulting in their ability to estimate work effort to be consistently off the mark. 7) Understaffed projects and those with smaller teams often lead to social isolation, which is further compounded by being away from your family, and not having your work effort or extra hours recognized at round tables. 8) You are unable to ask for help from senior peers without it being held against you. Since optics are so important at this firm, and perceived reputations are spread quickly, PMs try to salvage a project independently rather than meet with their Partner lead. Managing a workstream is often a siloed journey where you feign competency and green status updates to avoid backlash. 9) The lack of recognition, support, meaningful work, work life balance, and trusted communication at this firm will push you toward burnout faster than you ever knew was possible. Staff are referred to as resources here, and leadership and HR truly mean it. Most feel disposable and undermined especially after year end, where the company rating system is heavily mismatched with performance results and incentives. Very few staff have faith in the current performance management system, which is highly subjective, often anchored to project rather than individual outcomes, and heavily in need of a revamp. There is a heavy misalignment between project managers on how to use the rating system, which causes friction in year end comparisons across peer groups. 10) Long drawn out cookie-cutter projects across the same client defeat the purpose of joining a consulting firm. Often the perks of working in consulting, including diversified project exposure, outweigh the sacrifices that come along with this career. However at a firm like Capco where travel, incentives, and expenses are constrained and infrequent, the added drawback of working on a singular client relegate the firm experience to one resembling industry clientele. A lot of the policies that are marketed to prospective hires are purely marketing material and rarely adhered to. I heavily encourage prospective hires to speak to those of us currently working here about the perks you are told about in recruiting (i.e. whether you can truly expense course fees or evening meals). There are quite a few cultural issues at this company that have been progressively worsening, with the pandemic and recent acquisition only accelerating these. The heart of some senior leadership are in the right place, but as the firm grows, CATO leadership's hands seem to be tied with how much they can actually do. Some of these cultural issues are as follows: 1) While CATO is more forward thinking and digitally inclined than our peer international offices, the misalignment and head office bureaucracy continues to grow. Most leadership have implied they were also unaware of the recent acquisition until a few days before the rest of us found out. On its current trajectory, this acquisition will only have negative implications on the current office culture many were drawn to CATO for. 2) The firm is bad at managing and committing to expectations and timelines, and is perceived by staff to be heavy on lip service (e.g. most notably our recently delayed promotion results and April 2020 lay offs). Leadership are good at saying the right things but very poor at executing and managing expectations. This time last year, many of us were reassured by Lance and Chris that no pandemic related layoffs were planned, while less than a couple of weeks later many peers were laid off. Now we are being told that the Wipro acquisition will not result in cost synergies, while Wipro press releases and exchange filings explicitly state that there are identified cost synergies to be realized post integration. While we can assume that most of these synergies will affect manual/inefficient corporate service groups, many of us are also worried about the inevitability of our roles and progression being baselined with Wipro. 3) It is ironic that we are a consulting firm when we have so many internal inefficiencies and issues that we barely look into. We have an entire army of critical thinkers who would more than gladly submit anonymous feedback if simply given an intake form or virtual suggestion box. Our bench is also very poorly utilized, where many of those resources could be working on items like the above. Given the current exodus, there is no current bench, which further amplifies the internal problems the firm has since there are no resources to work on rectifying these. 4) Leadership do not care about project managers abilities to manage downward, and are perceived to be easily influenced. For example, toxic project managers that have been formally reprimanded for their treatment of project staff continue to be praised in leadership communications, and are continually rewarded as long as they bring in sales. Others that have not been formally reported also continue to affect the mental health of project staff since there is no optimal way to report them. A lot of the longer term employees at this firm should be heavily scrutinized in terms of their value add, and whether they are being retained out of convenience or because they truly benefit the firm and help retain talent rather than drive people out. 5) Learning and development is a mockery. As a consulting firm, where people should be the firm's assets, the firm continues to cut funding for learning opportunities, relying on flyover lunch and learns with less value than most Wikipedia articles. Day long courses are often very introductory and heavily scrutinized by project managers for impacting billability and project work. It boggles the mind that in the 21st century with digital course mediums, our L&D programs and curriculums are still in the stone age, offered on a periodic basis and not as soon as you require the content. Attendance spots for courses are typically filled by junior level resources, who still require oversight from those of us with more experience, further indicating the surface level depth and inapplicability of the content to day to day business. Project assets are also often reinventions of the same wheel since there is very little knowledge sharing across projects external to individual Partner accounts. 6) The prestige of the brand has also been steadily deteriorating as we shift toward becoming an implementation tech shop, hiring recruits from no-name brands and lower tier competitors. If you are fond of software development and implementation, you will better resonate with the current direction we are headed in than most of the current business workforce.