Even with great employees, great teams and great camaraderie, this is a case of Leadership ruining something good. Leadership in general is poor. It’s unheard of for a company this size to have CEOs and other C suite employees so ingrained in the day to day operations of teams, especially on the Tech side where they bring zero value as they lack any technical background. Forward calls itself a Fin-Tech, but the “tech” is grossly exaggerated. They don’t want to spend the resources or time improving our tech, which is far behind our competitors. They constantly micromanage and don’t trust the very people they’ve hired to make decisions for their departments. This has driven away great employees.
In place of great employees have been internal hires being put in leadership positions where they have no background or real knowledge in the new roles they’ve acquired. This of course leads to turmoil and confused direction. Company goals can change at any given moment, which any leader knows doesn’t result in success.
Bringing in a new CTO was exciting because the company desperately needed an Exec with a tech background. However, as new execs often do, they made sweeping changes leading to unexpected layoffs (which Forward has been known to do in the past) with zero warning. Meanwhile, HR continues to post each day on LinkedIn about how great the culture is and how much they value their female staff during Women’s History month, mere hours after laying off several female tech members. It’s incredibly disingenuous.
Lastly, the long term plan seems to be outsourcing every position possible to our DR location. US positions have been laid off only to have that position posted almost immediately after, just in the DR. If I were in sales, underwriting or customer service I would be highly cautious of taking a job at Forward. As soon as they can get someone to do your job for cheaper, you too will be laid off (and likely without warning, since these layoffs are mostly unrelated to performance).
