Pros
Relatively decent facilities. Not usually difficult to get time off at short notice. Salaries ok and benefits package quite good. Looks good on the CV. Some valuable charity work opportunities supported by the company.
Cons
Rigid hierarchical management structure, with a tendency to rule by fear. Anyone who questions senior management is treated badly. Some senior staff have too much power and there are no controls over how they use it. Morale among staff is low - people do not feel respected or valued. You are simply a disposable commodity. Employees with problems related to their role or manager have nowhere to turn for support. People are never sure whether they are at risk of redundancy . A lot of knowledgable, competent staff have been made redundant with seemingly little forward planning - this has left huge gaps in some areas. The appraisal system is supposed to feed into pay/promotion but in reality it does not - ratings on appraisals are in some areas decided solely by a senior manager with no knowledge of individuals' performance. There are no controls to prevent these decisions being made on personal grounds and there is no way to contest them. On a day to day basis, the company has many policies and procedures and endless monitoring by different departments - including repeated monitoring of the same things where there is no need for it. There are too many layers of management which results in work creation. There is a lot of box-ticking and endless different layers of approval are needed for even the tiniest decision, which is frustrating, especially if you are used to having accountability for your own work. Small tasks take too long and important issues are sidelined. On the other hand, there is a reluctance at senior level to take accountability for important issues. Everything that needs support is either outsourced or handled remotely, which means it is difficult to speak to a human about any issues of any kind that arise whether people or IT related. IT problems, for example, must be logged via a complicated online method, take a long time to resolve and there is no way of discussing them with a human being when they are (invariably) not fully resolved. Meanwhile, the company talks a lot about how well staff are treated. Staff are pressured into completing 'voluntary' and 'anonymous' surveys, the results of which are manipulated to play down the negatives. Some managers are allowed to probe into which employee gave which answer. The company claims to value talent but this only seems to apply at senior level. Below that, staff generally feel that there is no real opportunity for career progression or development, and true ability and expertise is not recognised or valued.
