July 4th?
Well, that gives them a few days to get some (in)appropriate T-shirts printed for the photo shoot...
Something along the lines of the Bell Atlantic "roadkill" event?
Capita IT Services staff waiting to hear if they have a future at the integrator-cum-reseller have been invited to attend a photo shoot to be used in marketing material. As exclusively revealed, Capita ITS put 1,000 workers at risk of redundancy on 30 March, giving back office employees 30 days notice and 90 days to …
I don't know about embezzlement in the strict sense, but hard up directors can always get their colleagues on the remuneration committee to mint them some fresh share options.
My current activity surrounds the design, strategy and performance of back office operations, and I can assure all who are interested that the best performing support services have absolutely no relationship with location. You can have high quality, low cost wherever you want, if you get the design right. Wage arbitrage is a phantom goal, sold by muppets to muppets (as many companies are now finding out). We're moving quickly to a world where companies wouldn't dare outsource their front line customer service to the back of beyond, but many are still too dim to see that the back office needs to operate to the same standards - if you can do that from India, all well and good, but it'll cost as much or more than from the UK (largely for two reasons - because you need to cherry pick your offshore workers for langugage skills and business initiative, and because developing countries see far higher staff turnover, so you need to pay top dollar plus regular increases to retain).
Take Dell - early movers in outsourcing their back office, following soon after with retail customer support. Gone is the day when an IT guy could recommend Dell to relatives, knowing that he could trust the company to build and support a good product. And the point I'm leading up to is that Dell were evidently misgoverned - not only did they have appalling corporate performance in the early 2000's, there was the faulty components business, which they knew about but kept pushing sales of the dodgy kit, there was "accounting mstatement" (meaning they lied to investors), and Dell acted in concert with Intel to rig the market. Financial services were early subscribers to the offshore/outsource ideal, and we can see what the ethics and competence of that sector are now.
I can think of more than a few other examples that I won't bore you with, but it seems to me that once companies decide that they're going to play the wage arbitrage game, all sense of propriety goes out the window.
I left this wretched company recently. They have such shocking ethics. For example, they would not allow me recruit what the client asked for because it was eating into their profit margin too much. They wanted to fleece the client with a trainee resource rather than pay what the market was paying.
Never seen such a nasty and horrid culture of bullying amongst their staff. Well worth of the name Crapita. I also hear that they are under investigation at Birningham City Council. And there is is an ongoing audit into their mess at Teachers Pensions Agency where they could not manage themselves out of a paper bag.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/government-computing-network/2012/may/14/service-birmingham-capita-value-labour
Yep - fleecing their customers is the name of the game. I remember having to set up desks with the latest kit for client visits so they could see their 'dedicated team' & equipment that they were paying for. As soon as the visits were over, the kit was recovered & the 'team' disbanded...
"Never seen such a nasty and horrid culture of bullying amongst their staff"
And dishonesty too.
The final straw for a lot of us in ITS was receiving a letter from senior management (& I use the term management in it's loosest possible sense) referring to a meeting that never happened the contents of which I precis here:
"The senior management are keeping your bonus money for themselves. Tough titty, suckers!"
Either have them take a pic of Indian employees or, better, have everyone make themselves up as Indian (or other
offshore) employees....
Honestly, a scumbag company like this deserves to disappear. Maybe (as in Dilbert a while back), when
Europe becomes a "fourth-world" area, then maybe the circle will complete and the jobs will be outsourced
back here....
Capita punishment...that's what they deserve....
As a service user as a Network Manager in a Birmingham school you can certainly see the difference between Service Birmingham staff employed back in the Stone Age when the council ran the IT services and were TUPE'd over, and those direct from Capita.
One's direct are rude and frankly about as useful as a chocolate teapot.
As someone who currently works in Capita and have been at risk then out of risk then back in risk and now officially finally out.
They dont give a shit about you guys and girls, they dont want anything other than to save the money and make CITS into a £1Billion a year business - that wont happen whilst we are outsourcing and things like having to ask your bosses boss even if you want to spend another £1 is stupid.
I went away on behalf of CITS recently - I ended up paying for my own meals (even though they give you £30 a day allowance - its *really* restricted) and had to raise a complaint (the hotel told me that CITS hadnt given the allowance on the fax so it was either starve all weekend or give the hotel my CC details).
This company DOESNT give a shit and never will, your cannon fodder to the likes of Russ Hewitt, etc - he is only interested in the bottom line and each £1 they save is more for his pockets (dont tell me he is making nothing out of this as thats just a pure lie).
I came from EDS - I am now in Capita - I am ready to get the fuck out of IT because of the pair of them.
i worked for captia once in housing benefits, the training was completely useless, i even made a point ot telling them to which they were surprised. when i was finally shown how to do some things, including calculating housing benefit, they paid me so little i was able to claim 25pound a week towards my housing hahaha ironic!!
In Bedford.
Bespoke software, so little training, I complained about lack of training and they extended my probation to 6 months.
I kicked up a right stomp.
After this period there was no improvement and I left.
I'm now earning 4k more and have more benefits. Don't work there!
Never again.
-T
Capita certainly have a knack for taking expert customer focussed companies and turning them in to faceless short term money making machines.
For example, I was working for them through the millenium change over and they just couldn't understand why, having replaced 80% of the kit at our fixed base of clients in12 months, we were unlikely to meet the compulsory 20% on top of the 1999 income.
Capita owes its success to the lazy nature of public sector and large customers - you'd like to think that that this kind of corporate and manglement failure would lead to a mass exodus of customers, even the public sector ones. What happened in my case was that within 12 months the 10 strong team of fantastic engineers were all but gone, but unbelievably most of the clients were still there.
Mine's the one with the Dummies Guide to Being Outsourced and a letter saying simply "ya boo sucks" in the pocket.
My wife was treated disgracefully by them when she became seriously ill and needed major surgery. She then sued them for unfair dismissal but they tried every trick in the book to get her to back down. Threats, intimidation, and finally, a feeble token payment offer to make her shut up and go away.
I'm pleased to say she won her case outright and Capita had to fork over a fair bit of readies. She signed a NDA which bars her from discussing the matter. I didn't. :)
Sting in the tail was, they then made life for me so bad I had to quit. I'm glad to be out of there but not in such a way.
Let me correct that for you - ALL the divisions of Crapita are scumbags who will happily rip off other areas of the company. Like when Training "forget" to include theIT costs of training in a bid; when the bid was won by Crapita this came to light and ITS had to "help out" and cover half the additional IT costs incurred by the training. OK this COULD have been a mistake, but THREE bids in a row the same "mistake" was made......
The company is a total joke to work for!!! Thank god they have gotten rid of most the crap managers, anyone who has worked on RDS will know who I am referring too! I bet none of the staff have opted for photo shoot either........... What a shame for Capita, they can't capture an English workforce before everyone leaves!!! I bet management know how they are feeling aswell but still don't care, can’t be nice for the staff leaving and the lucky ones that get to stay.