Unsustainable management model - Anonymous employee Xerox Employee Review

Xerox has consistently gone downhill over the last 10 years. Five years ago it was due to the economy and print market, but more recently it is the management model. The much touted $7B investment in ACS was supposed to bring tremendous growth for Xerox, but just last quarter the management admitted that the Xerox Services business is not working and they are working on “Services 2.0” to make it a sustainable and profitable business. So, we paid $7B for an unsustainable business? Every firm needs to run as lean as possible and continually look for ways to be more efficient, but Xerox is ultra-focused on cost reduction and is ignoring investments to grow the business by better meeting customer needs. The frequency of layoffs at Xerox is so common that it doesn’t even make the news anymore. Over the last year Xerox has laid off over 5,900 employees (average of almost 1,500 per quarter). Ten years ago your career discussions with your manager were about preparing you for the next promotion. Today those conversations are about the best group to work in to avoid the next layoff. Xerox is losing customers left and right due to the continual cuts in engineering, service, sales, and supply chain. Managers spend so much time dealing with irate customers that they don't have time to be proactive about improving the customer satisfaction of those who were not about to throw us out the door. The recent highly visible firing of Xerox by the state of Nevada is a sign of Xerox focusing on internal processes and ignoring the customer needs. It makes me sad to see what Xerox has come to. When I started with Xerox 20 years ago there was passion, pride, and excitement about working at Xerox. That’s long gone. If you walk in to a Xerox office today you will see rows of empty cubes, and employees that are completely demoralized.