Pros
There is a lot of ambition to modernise the organisation. Unfortunately this isn’t backed up with the capability to implement it on time, to quality, or in budget. Free tea and coffee in the office. There is a bit of a lack of effective internal control which can make it easier to get on with your job as long as nothing goes wrong.
Cons
The culture is very closed, introspective, and backwards looking. Senior leadership is cliquey and it’s all about how well you get on with a select group of influencers that will determine your success. External ideas are viewed with suspicion and often ignored in favour of an internal idea. Performance management is done to you rather than with you. It’s culturally acceptable for your manager to seek out constructive feedback anonymously and people have no problem throwing rocks in this process. In my case, feedback was shared multiple times with my peers and also discussed with people more junior than me… would anyone go on the record about this though?… No. The London office is severely over crowded to the point where you might have to work on a high chair or a kitchen table. Watch out for the bonuses advertised as ‘up to 40%’. Understand how the matrix to calculate these works and make sure you are aware of what the realistic numbers are in light of the company’s ongoing poor performance. Expenses are paid through payroll so you’ll be out of pocket for weeks if you miss the cut off. There are regular cost cutting exercises which creates an uneasy work environment because people aren’t discrete about what’s happening. These are resulting in large scale redundancies so take care.
