@Harp – The bank also takes great pains to not communicate mergers and certain problems to employees who are not part of senior management.
Only because I’ve been through it before did I recognize the signs about two years ago. The merger didn’t happen, luckily, because the other bank is now in serious trouble with the OTS. That was two+ years ago. Many employees left during the merger talk time and weren’t replaced. Others have left since then and approximately 10% of those have been replaced. (With a staff of approximately 190 people, that’s not very many. And almost all of those were branch positions.) We were recently told, “no raises, no tuition reimbursement, we’re not filling open positions that aren’t 100% critical, no more travel and we’re done matching your 401k.” I truly believe that senior management is trying to get our stock price up to put us in a better position to be sold.
@jenpi – Sorry for the tangent! Harp is right, they try to keep things quiet to avoid a crisis, or more of one.