Mark Hurd, good on structure, but bad on morale?

I've been a fan of Mark Hurd at HP since his arrival.  I think he really understands how to create corporate structure and how to make bold business moves.  In the most recent InfoSmack podcast, which covered such things as HP hiring Dave Donatelli away from EMC and non-compete agreements,  I again spoke very highly of Hurd's decision to hire Donatelli,which prompted Stephen Foskett to ask why I wouldn't just kiss him.

But now I'm wishing I would have tempered my response a bit after becoming aware over the weekend of what appears to be a morale problem at HP.  It's hard to know how much credence to give the site Glassdoor.com, but there are enough negative employee reviews of HP there that it convinced me that not all is well at HP. 

These are tough times to be sure and it's not difficult to understand why employees would be upset about a 5% pay decrease when the company is still profitable.  Maybe I have outdated notions about work, but I think motivation is very important.  The question is how are you supposed to be motivated when the company you work for is generating healthy profits (although maybe not up to financial analyst expectations) and you find yourself on the receiving end of a company pay cut?  At the end of the day, does a pay cut pay off in corporate productivity?

Comments

[nate]

I kind of miss the good 'ol days at HP. My dad worked there for about 25 years or something. He told me how he remembered them celebrating their first $50M year. They treated us pretty good when he worked at their HQ in Palo Alto in the 80s, then we moved to Beijing where he was assistant(?) manager there for a couple years then he convinced them to open an office in Thailand where he was the main manager there for a few years until he retired(too much stress). I still remember the stretch limos coming to pick us up at their HQ in the 80s to take our family to the airport for vacations and stuff. That was the last time I was in a stretch limo I think.

I knew a guy who worked at HP(Idaho I think) back in the late 90s and what he described was terrible, where they had budgets for everything and charged people for using everything from disk/tape space to bandwidth. He told me about one time he downloaded a Linux ISO image overnight and blew out his department's bandwidth quota for the month(?).

And of course Fiorina helped stomp down on the company quite a bit more. I remember the massive supply chain problems they had when they were trying to merge with compaq, server orders went from taking days to taking weeks or more.

Then there's their calculators which have gone into the toilet for the most part my dad sent me a note about HP-35 getting an IEEE award recently, I think HP may of revived one or two of their good models from what I've read over the years but for the most part the quality and stuff has gone way down.

I remember him bringing home one of(if not the?) first palmtop computers that ran DOS and had a 286 CPU in it I think, back in 1992 or something. had a pretty nice keyboard on it even by today's standards if I recall right.

oh how times have changed..

[John F.]

I don't know.

I really try to refrain from commenting on such matters. In this case, the clash of cultures and management styles on the horizon... well, that'll be an interesting storm to watch whatever way it turns out. We'll just have to wait and see if Calvin is still gloating 6 months from now.

John

[marc farley]

Calvin seems like a guy with a lot of passion for his work at HP. I expect he'll be on board with whatever the future offers him there.

[John F.]

Like I said,

I'll be intersesting to see if that enthusiasm dims in the face of the ensuing tsunami. Beyond that, I'd really rather not speculate.

[Nigel]

As with just about anything in life - you can take it (such as a pay cut) on the chin and keep going if you're a "believer" and feel valued etc....

Its hard to feel valued and important in a massive company like HP - unless you're a big cheese.... As for "believing", what do you "believe in" in a company that large? Most folks are so far from senior management and only see the day to day internal politics and the likes...

I imagine that both of the above are easier to foster in smaller companies where its easier to feel important and know where the company is heading and what its core values are.......

May be this translates to long time HPers taking it better than the newer guys who are still struggling with getting to grips with the internal structures (re-structures), cross-charges and politics..

Implementing a company wide pay-cut while the company is still profitable is questionable. If there is a good reason and that reason is communicated well and supporting evidence is visible to staff then may be morale will not suffer too badly.

I hope its not take take take from HP, otherwise they will generate a whole load of dusgruntled employees who will feel justified in being bad employees.

Heres hoping this credit crunch isnt going to encourage a new wave of employers abusing their staff.

[J]

Implementing a company wide paycut when the company is still profitable, with every indication that it will continue to be so, is just corporate greed in light of the down economy, and it's despicable. Executive management is acting simply to protect their obscene bonuses for obtaining certain profit levels, and that's the wrong motivation. HP's move to 'save the company' is insulting, the company will survive the year with a healthy profit on the books.

At my small company, we also took 5% paycuts, 10% for the execs, but we aren't profitable yet, and the paycuts will help us survive this year in case things go horribly wrong in the economy. Survival in our case means that we won't shut our doors permanently.

However, we are small enough that every single one of us knows how much value we deliver, and we believe in the direction we're headed. The paycut certainly isn't motivational, but we have the benefit of knowing exactly how our company is doing financially, and where we going. That, more than anything else, makes the difference.

[edser]

Im an EDSER of 14 years. Working for EDS/HP at the moment is very tough. Everyday there is some new rumour about have the execs are going to screw some more money out of us, or some exec walking away with a huge golden parachute, then theres the ongoing WFRs, but worst of all are the torrent of lies that the HP execs tell us.

I used to feel proud in working long hours to get the job done in this company. Now I (and many other hard working people like me) just keep my head down and try not to get involved...as to get involved means to lie to your colleagues and customers.

IBM are just laughing at us.