1. They monitor how many times you swipe your badge in the office and if it is not at least 3x per week, it is a problem. I went on vacation one week and got asked why I wasn't in 3x that week. My line manager had to explain to HR that I was on annual leave. It was not a problem in the end, but the fact that someone was tracking me so closely made me very uncomfortable and feel like Big Brother was watching. 2. No flexible teleworking options. They used to allow you to telework more, and now the company is cracking down hard. The company has announced that they will penalize your bonus if you are not in 3x weekly in 2023, and they applied that retrospectively to on-site attendance in 2022, which was quite bizarre and surprising to both employees and managers alike when they executed on this. 3. Overworked and under-resourced for priority studies, which puts so much extra pressure on employees. 4. Culture needs lots of work. They are constantly changing their policy on conference attendance and say you can only go if you have a business reason (which basically means if you are attending an important steering committee meeting or similar). It used to be that you would go for learning and developing and meeting people, but this has changed. It means that most clinical scientists end up not having a good "business reason" since we typically aren't steering committee members, and only physicians end up going to conferences. 5. The open office environment is also terrible--I had to spend countless mornings hunting for a space to work because there are not enough desks for everyone in the department. It feels like you are working in a call center because there aren't enough quiet rooms and as a global company, we are all on calls daily with our colleagues from across the globe. So it looks and feels like a call center. Very challenging to actually get reading/writing/data review done in such a chaotic environment and I never end up sitting next to my actual team because there are no assigned desks.
