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It’s September 2025, and Oracle is rolling out its annual “Your Voice” survey to the employees who remain, after several large rounds of reductions in workforce took place. There are still employees in garden leave (on notice but unable to access the network until their last day on September 22) while the invite goes out. Internally the mood of employees is somber because every round of layoffs take place unannounced, with no organizational change taking place. Remaining employees have to discover who was let go by peeking in places to see what accounts have been suspended, or look for email bounce-backs when communicating with each other, then share that information with their teams.

This isn’t about AI

This is about a commitment to company culture. It’s about recognizing and growing talent in your organization, and the ability to nurture a workspace where employees are welcome and others want to work. Oracle makes it clear that there is no company loyalty.

The Contradiction of Voices

The “Your Voice” survey is doublespeak at Oracle. There is no real interest in improving the workplace; its about how far the company can go to let employees be uncomfortable in their workspace. They measure the levels of acceptable attrition more than employee satisfaction.

Oracle is excited to launch the global Your Voice employee survey. Your participation and feedback are instrumental in shaping the future of how we work. By sharing your unique perspective, you are helping Oracle create a better employee and customer experience.

Survey Intro

The #1 issues in survey responses are equitable pay, and requests to attach performance reviews with compensation; and every year the company either turns a blind eye or have management explicitly shut conversations down.

This year there were early announcements from senior management that there would be no focal, no bonus, and only dry promotions.

No Anonymity in Completing the Survey

Survey responses are not anonymous, and that creates a tension for employees. They are unable to provide feedback without having their responses tied back to them. At the highest level, HR connects survey responses to your personal information. Managers receive aggregate feedback for seven or more respondents, and it’s relatively simple to drill down to the lowest functional manager in a group to review answers, and tie each response to an individual employee. If you include text comments, your writing style and topics of response are considered. Even if you use only ratings, it becomes a profile to match against your HCM record.

Employees have to decide whether to speak truthfully about their workplace experience, knowing that the result can be detrimental to their career, or in elimination of their positions. Although “optional”, managers push employees to complete surveys to achieve artificially high response rates in their org. The metric for organizational engagement in survey response literally has more focus than organizational response to the survey issues.

The Employee Loyalty Index

Every Oracle employee has a “Loyalty Index” (LI). This has been a part of Machine Learning algorithms in Oracle Advanced Analytics for over a decade, and is part of the Human Capital Management Suite. It is contemplated that employees with low LIs are at the top of the layoff ranking lists. Source: https://www.thelayoff.com/t/1k2jkgj52

It’s not about performance, or value of contribution, or thought leadership. It’s about how well you can stay engaged while being overlooked and overworked.

Consider that good, productive employees who routinely provide honest feedback and are ignored will eventually turn a sour note. The company is willfully unresponsive, and will continue to do nothing unless a change is forced on them by its employees; and Oracle depends on the likelihood of that remaining low.

The huge hole in the logic of a loyalty index is that the company shows zero loyalty to employees. Trust is a reciprocal belief, and Oracle is not a trustworthy partner to its workforce. There is a profound lack of transparency, a history of suppressing open communication, a failure to recognize and celebrate achievement. It should be no surprise that even committed, productive employees are unable to achieve a high loyalty index.

A Lack of Meaningful Improvements for Employees

These are my responses from the 2021 employee survey, shortly after the first major RIF took place in August 2020. None of the issues raised here have been addressed, and it’s fair to say that it has only gotten worse.

Whether you work there now or not, consider the kind of culture that Oracle advertises, versus how it practices. It’s all Deflect, Deny, Defend.

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Reward & Recognition (Pay for Performance, Compensation Recognition)

• Pay has been an issue for several years that management has not addressed. We ask that management raises the issue to executives and to the board.
• Pay is not to scale for certain geographies, or for employees who have been with the company for a long time.
• Dry promotions are common, and can go without an associated pay increase for more than 1 year.
• Raises and bonuses for operational employees have been virtually non-existent for a majority of the workforce for several years.
• Pay has been separated from performance, which means that working hard doesn’t equate to work is rewarded.
• The RIF in August 2020 resulted in the termination of employees who contributed substantially to the company with little effort to retain or retrain that staff, and no succession planning to migrate roles and responsibilities before the terminations took place.
• Our lines of business lost valuable reward and recognition programs in the consolidation to a new business unit.
• There are fewer employees and more work. Management appears to be more concerned about tracking acceptable rates of attrition than retaining employees.
• Loyalty and morale are highly affected.

Ultimately, is Oracle a company that sees its employees as skilled labor assets only (drop assets here, purchase new assets in this lower cost-center or with these skillsets), or does it see employees as essential resources that build the company, who should be invested in, upskilled and retained to grow employee productivity, contribution and satisfaction?

Leadership & Strategy (Division/LOB Accountability, Leadership keeping team informed, Leadership Team)

• In the past year, we lost critical leaders and have seen several senior executives come and go. [redacted] retirement, [redacted] death, [redacted] retirement, the departure of [redacted], the placement of [redacted] over a consolidated business unit, his subsequent departure to introduce Jae Evans as the current CIO.
• Oracle made a point of reducing its number of managers during the RIF. If they weren’t terminated, key managers moved out of Oracle IT to other lines of business or left the company.
• There have been multiple re-orgs. Some employees attest to having been re-orged at least 10 times in the past year.
• Now part of OCI, our business unit continues to be re-shaped (new org structures, new tools, new processes, new reporting) while having lost critical management, business operations, governance, and standards.
• Recent management hires appear to all be siphoned from Walmart.
• New leadership team members do not invest in their teams or communicate and lead as expected.
• New management does not communicate timely messages critical to driving business and does not share valuable organizational change.
• Communications and Organizational Planning teams were either re-org’d, laid off or disbanded.

Learning/Growth Opportunities/Career Discussion (Learning & Development, Career Path Clarity)

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Oracle provides exceptional learning opportunities through Oracle University, LinkedIn Learning, O’Reilly subscriptions, 3rd party training and college reimbursement programs; however:

• Employees are unable to leverage much of these resources due to inability to allocate sufficient time to training, a general lack of planning by employees and managers using HCM tools, and a lack of understanding by management about funding training or prioritization of employee development initiatives.
• From a strategic perspective Oracle fails to implement a consistent strategy on professional development and career path planning.
• There are no retention-based training programs.
• There is no career path guidance, and leveling guidance does not adequately differentiate between IC levels.
• There is no standard maintenance of professional accreditations, and there are no communities designed to foster these types of programs.
• Oracle has failed to implement HCM Career and Performance modules (Talent Profile, Goals, Career Development) to improve management’s ability to survey organizational competencies for organizational planning.

Wellbeing (Work/Life Balance, Wellbeing, Career Discussion)

Oracle work-from-home policy was implemented March 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The majority of the past year has been in a work-from-home setting where employees have often struggled to adapt to life during the coronavirus. Home offices may be improvised (desks, monitors, seating, lights, workspace etc.) with home interruptions (childcare, shared family network connections, etc.).

• Separation of work and home becomes harder. It is difficult to set examples (manager responds to an email at 1AM; is the expectation that the team reflect similar hours?)
• Corporate citizenship initiatives (location events, ERG events, volunteer programs, healthy-at-work programs) are canceled or moved to virtual.
• There is a pronounced loss of dedicated workspace, and of workplace culture, camaraderie and loyalty.
• During the pandemic employees find it more difficult to leave home, exercise, eat right, stay healthy.
• Employees are working longer hours and on days off due to recent RIFs, higher workloads, more priorities.

Modern and Agile Processes & Tools (Organizational Barriers)

• There is a lack of standard tools, processes and reporting because there is no management of the end-to-end lifecycle of tools, or for a “productivity set” for employees with no central architectural guidance or strategy for employee productivity.
• There is no enterprise content strategy. Method of update of documentation is unknown; it is difficult to find content owners or determine how content can be updated.
• There are no project standards for Oracle IT.
• There are a plethora of ticketing systems.
• Reports often have to be manually created due to inability to combine sources and generate meaningful automated reports.
• There is insufficient planning around tooling decisions, particularly for considering requirements and incorporating feedback from teams.
• There is inconsistent strategy (Oracle-at-Oracle vs 3rd party “make or buy”, vendor selection based on the vendor’s adoption as a Cloud customer, lack of consolidated vendor relations, decisions where consolidated teams must adopt the tools and processes used by acquiring team without evaluating process, productivity or costs, failure to manage the end-to-end lifecycle of our tools; re-organization that results in new managers with new strategies and new tooling, etc.
• Application help is typically generic and not helpful.
• Processes are not documented consistently. Process is difficult to find.
• There is no enterprise search. There is no useful search capability in existing tools.