Bad - Credit Controller NCH Employee Review

I definitely agree with the two reviews from August 2017, but I want to add a few things: No chance of progression and/or acknowledgement: This is partly due to NCH being a relatively flat organisation, but also there is a complete lack of meritocracy. No matter how clever or hard worker, it is very difficult to get any recognition. Often those with knowledge and understanding are overlooked for positions of responsibility. Those who get recognised are usually the loudest rather than the best. Underpaid. Understaffed. Overworked: NCH Finance is so badly structured that the AR team is expected to handle customer complaints and other tasks not related to AR just because someone has to do it, and there is no specifically designated department for that. The AR salary itself is clearly below market average, not to mention having to take on all of those extra tasks. Besides, underpaying employees yields a high employee turnover. This precludes continuity as well as the smooth work of the team, with people constantly leaving and coming. Well, coming would be in the best of cases. Generally people will leave and NCH will not get a replacement until the workload becomes more than unmanageable for the rest of the team. Then, without any effort from HR but rather other team members submitting CVs from their acquaintances, they will eventually find a replacement that will be trained by the rest of the team. This -yet another- piece of extra work will not be taken into account when it comes to the (non-existent) annual salary review. However, false promises will be all too common ('Things will get better soon blah, blah, blah…'). Lack of guidelines and daily conflict: The way in which the company is (so badly) structured generates constant confrontation in between departments. Instead of working towards the same goals, regional offices and the centralised financial services office work in two opposite directions: the AR team needs to keep the debt under control, whereas regional team just wants to increase sales at any cost. This, together with the total lack of clear policies and authority, results in daily fights and struggles in which, following superiors’ instructions, the lowest level workers will end up fighting already lost battles and having to bear disrespectful -if not plainly abusive- behaviour from the overpowered sales team. And indeed, they are pointless struggles since the same superiors, surrendering to pressure, will change their mind and contradict their subordinates, condescendingly instructing them to abandon the stance they had previously ordered them to defend and letting them get all the blame for having being so intransigent. Credit controllers will soon learn that, paradoxically, they have no control over credit whatsoever. They also must be highly resistant to frustration and assume they will constantly be constrained to just hope for the best while following contradictory orders from different statements of management on a daily basis. • Middle and Senior Managers are just oblivious, if not worse: In most and best of cases management is clueless and mediocre. Usually, the good ones do not last for long which means constant changes in key managerial positions. And, although I do not doubt their good intentions and cannot deny the many challenges and pressure they face, new managers have shown excessive eagerness to please their superiors, rushing towards implementation of really impractical -or so-called “innovative and improved”- processes devised by them without having listened at all to their most experienced team members, resulting in constant failings and readjustments, having people forced to run around like headless chickens or even hopelessly resigning. In more serious cases, certain managers’ hostility towards some capable workers has played a main role in the latters’ decision to resign, with HR proving itself useless once again. As for my own experience, I left due to a more attractive job offer, despite NCH’s attempt to bargain with a pay rise which arrived too late and was presented to me almost as a mere courtesy. During my notice I had to deal with some behaviours bordering on harassment and retaliation as if, somehow, they took my resignation kind of personally. It was a shameful lack of professionalism.