It is on a Downhill Journey.... - Anonymous employee Fractal Employee Review

2.0
13 Mar 2014
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

1 - People, People and People. Fractal manages to get good people and HAD good culture (which unfortunately is dying). CEO is trying to bring people centric policies but things are yet to mature 2 - CEO is passionate about the company and is trying very hard to keep a good culture going but I feel he is not adequately supported by middle and senior management 3 - HR is changing and it is for good (360 feedback mechanism and other initiatives)

Cons

1 - Hiring Policy: Externalizing the growth is biggest mistake Fractal has made over the last 2 years. It slows down the growth and learning opportunities of existing employees across levels (even the growth at Analyst and SA levels have slowed down). Also, it has made the Fractal Pyramid uneven (Span of control is inconsistent across levels) 2 - Sub par Compensation 3 - Lateral Managers: Many new managers that Fractal have brought in are not able to adjust quickly (they are one of the reasons of dying culture, politics and attrition). Image and perception (like all other big organizations) has become more important than getting actual work done 4 - Mentoring: Since the Fractal outlook has been to externalize the growth, there has been very less focus on grooming and mentoring existing talent pool. Also, trainings if provided are inadequate and not very effective. Managers (who should be the one to coach) are so busy in managing their image and in fire-fighting that they do not see this as important task to spend their time on. This resulted in creating a weak next in line managers 5 - Quality of Work & Staffing: Fractal primarily does reporting work with some good analytics project. You have to blessed to be able to work on such projects. And poor staffing decisions have many time messed up such good projects which almost never came back 6 - High Negativity and Attrition: All the above factors have made the work environment very negative where people just finding nooks in what others are doing and the crab mentality has sunk in. All these dissatisfaction at work place has resulted in unprecedented attritions rates and it needed drastic (like people policy) steps to halt them temporarily (appraisal cycle should revive the flow). Also, Fractal has unable to realize who the key people are and they have not been able to retain them. This will hurt in the long term

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Fractal Response
12y
Very sorry to hear that you feel this way after spending more than 3 years at Fractal. (a) Our growth has been rapid and hence it was necessary to bring people from outside. Yes, many of the lateral hires come from cultures that are not exactly like the company we are trying to build. That's the reason we have made the hiring process so stringent (one "no" means "no" overall) (b) Compensation - Well, at a company level, our compensation costs are more than 50% of our revenues, indicating that our compensations are in line with our pricing. However, this doesn't guarantee any individual's pay being equitable. Also, this doesn't guarantee that the compensation is adequate by market standards. Those benchmarks that we have suggest we are certainly above median in our compensation. Lastly, we are able to attract people from the outside within our compensation parameters, indicating that our compensation may not be sub par at the aggregate level. There could still be issues and you may be perfectly right. (c) Mentoring - Both mentors and mentees would need to make more efforts for this to work. I do agree with you that we need to work on this at Fractal. I would be very happy to discuss in more detail if we can meet in person. Srikanth

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