Pros
Some of the most switched on, competent and friendly individual contributors and managers you could hope to work with. Flexible working and generally decent benefits, although less good than they used to be.
Cons
Leadership and their lack of competence, strategic focus and aversion to feedback. A pattern of sweeping decisions without consultation. The redundancy process has been mentioned in multiple other reviews, the only thing to add is that in some instances line managers didn’t know members of their team were being made redundant until the last minute and had no input. At the same time they made abrupt changes to benefits based on a handful of abuses which should have been handled under the manager’s discretion. Instead of working with line managers to better handle these cases they slashed holiday benefit for everyone. Changes were made to the feedback mechanisms from anonymous submissions to being directed to a drop in session with the CEO. When most of the problems are coming from the top of the organisation this is discouraging honest feedback in that to critique leadership you have to do it in a call with the CEO. They also changed how the regular engagement surveys worked on a new HR system. Most of the questions remained the same but there were two key questions about leadership and strategic direction that were dropped from the previous version, most of the remaining questions were about general support from your manager and day to day working. This makes it look like staff are more engaged than they really are as most people have good relationships with their peers in the organisation but it is clear in the reviews here that leadership and strategy is lacking. An increasing pattern of employing staff in the Philippines. Less than a year after colleagues were made redundant I saw new starters from the Philippines taken on to do very similar roles to some of those that had been redundant. Fundamentally the problem is nepotism and lack of leadership competence. In general the leadership team are nice people, but they are doers rather than leaders. Instead of keeping the company to the strategic direction and supporting the teams in their initiatives they meddle and kick off their own projects that people are dragged in to, despite those projects already having been identified as low value. What other reviews have described as “fast paced” is wildly swinging between projects because leadership are sinking resources into what they hope will be quick wins instead of sticking to the core strategy.
