When I joined the company, I met a lot of ambitious and enthusiastic people. Unfortunately, the enthusiasm was short-lived. I joined a division of ~25people and within 1year ~17 of them had left with others openly expressing dissatisfaction towards the role. The turnover in other divisions was of a similar scale. Turnover is part of business, especially in consultancies but when you have >65% of your team leaving within months and see multiple people visually demoralised at work when they started so motivated it raises concerns about the culture.
At ALTEN, business managers work hard. Their job demands them to work outside of hours already on a 9-6 contract and a lot of them are talented people with impressive experience. However, the work input did not match the results. I can confidently say the root cause for the company's consistent underperformance is far more complex than the employee's competence although the majority of the blame was placed there.
In company-wide meetings where performance data was shared, the focus was on highlighting missed targets. It would have been more helpful to derive insights from the data to improve business strategy or find root causes to underperformance. Using data primarily to remind people targets are not being hit consequently made a lot of meetings redundant and a large proportion of the attendees disengaged.
Management has done a good job growing the business and now is struggling with the challenge of managing and cultivating a positive-minded, supportive, and motivated culture at scale. The reluctancy to move away from old-school practices of severely overworking and under-rewarding employees will continue to attest to the company’s steady decline in the UK.
