Last year, my company of 10 years was purchased by Wellsky. The announcement was your typical acquisition announcement. “No one panic, nothing is changing for now, keep going business as usual”.
I held a management position in the IT team and owned a significant number of systems in the purchased company’s environment. I expected that I would begin to receive meetings and contacts for planning the merging or replacement of our IT systems. I also would have expected that a person in my situation, owning so many systems and historical knowledge of the environment would have received a retention agreement of some sort. None of those things happened.
I waited roughly a month after the announcement to start poking things and trying to figure out what the plan was. During that time, all projects, and all initiatives came to a screeching halt. We finally received an invite to join a Town Hall meeting. The majority of our 200+ person company was Remote. We had designed everything in our environment to be a Remote First company. We quickly realized that anyone that lived within 50 miles of the Kansas City Office, regardless of job function, was requested to come join the town hall in person. This was the first indication that a remote first company was going to be forced to come into an office, but only if you live within an arbitrary distance of the office space. Everyone else was seemingly going to be able to continue to work from home.
During these events, I was finally contacted by the current senior manager of corporate IT. He asked to setup a meeting with me, but I was directed by my leadership to postpone that meeting. Weird to say the least. When I finally met this person, he took myself and my direct reports to lunch after the town hall. A bunch of oversharing happened, I found myself wishing I could get my team out of there as this was not the time nor the place to discuss a number of the items that were discussed, such as moving from salary to hourly, expectations to be in office 5 days a week even though “company policy is only 3 days a week”. This meeting was my first sign definite sign to begin looking for a job. This man ultimately ended up leaving wellsky shortly after this meeting leaving us wondering who our team would be working with going forward.
Time goes on, and my Boss and I tried to take things into our own hands and we begin putting together a plan for migration of IT systems. We created a document of all company IT systems, what pitfalls there might be in relation to each system and migrating them. Any efforts to get the ball rolling on planning was met with zero response. Between this effort, and a number of other attempts to begin communication channels, efforts to reduce chances of downtime or loss of business, none of these things were given the time of day. I came to realize that the plan was likely to quiet cut the entire IT team.
When I found a new job a short time later, I gave a little over 3 weeks notice to try and give extra time for knowledge and account ownership transfers. It was not until my last 2 days that I had a meeting with anyone on the team at Wellsky. They joined the call and had nothing planned and only a couple of questions about office 365. I believe they had no intention of learning anything about or environment and what may happen to operations teams if things are not managed.
I’ve been away from the company for a few days, and today I logged into their portal so that I could view some benefits and termination information. Upon logging in, I got a teams notification that one of the IT leaders had sent a message in a teams chat I was a part of. This message was degrading one of the systems we had in our environment and laughing about it as if it was below them. I think that maybe they should consider securing accounts of terminated employees, rather than scoffing at the systems their acquisitions chose to employ.
Wellsky is a lost conglomeration of fragmented acquisitions, with no one in the IT department that is willing to take ownership or assume a true leadership role. The buck is passed, or simply left to drop entirely. If you are joining this company as part of an acquisition, and you work in IT. I would recommend that you run. Fast.
