Pros
The people who work at this Company are kind and helpful.
Cons
- No bonuses for a job well done. - Yearly cost of living increases are on average 2% - All employee incentives gone or severely reduced - Hiring freeze so no opportunities for advancement. - Xcel is experiencing a large talent loss due to their regressive policies and with these positions not being filled those that remain are feeling overworked and burnt out. And managers don't have the bandwidth to provide guidance and mentor staff. - Medical, dental and vision benefits are the amongst the worst I'd ever seen. High deductible with terrible coverage until you meet 100% of the deductible. - Terrible EAP. Workers are suffering mentally from exhaustion and they have no tools available to them. When you call EAP, you are given a list of providers who are no longer accepting new patients. - Horrible HR. We have been told to prioritize our HR questions because HR is overwhelmed and cannot address all of our concerns. - Horrible IT. I feel sorry for anyone with IT issues because a ticket is opened and it is as if it goes into a black hole. None of your concerns are timely addressed. - Managed chaos. The lack of organization and communication at this Company is mind boggling. - Return to office (RTO). I saved the worst for last. We had a 20% in office expectation until July. We were told that beginning in September we had to be in the office every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. The announcement by the CEO had data masked as if if came from Xcel employees when in fact it was quotes from an unnamed consulting firm. If you ask most Xcel employees the biggest benefit of working for Xcel and most will say the 20% in office expectation. Employees were worried about the cost of parking and public transportation. We were given a list of local parking lots and told we would pay full price for public transportation pre-tax. Employees were worried about security and were told to call the security hotline if they ran into an issue or ask one of the two security guards to escort you. There was no thought given to workspace. There are several people who have no place to sit when they RTO because Xcel has more employees than workspaces. And the people who do have an assigned workspace are crammed into these ridiculously small cubicles. Because of a shortage of space, you have teams divided up on multiple floors so in-person collaboration is difficult. Employees were worried about distractions because we are crammed into small spaces and the Company has a conference room shortage. We were told we should talk in a whisper tone to not disturb our co-workers on Teams calls.