GLG reviews

-Severe lack of leadership: The Gurugram leadership is either absent from everything or irrelevant. They come and go as they please. Take leaves as they please. In the six hours (yes, they don't even work eight hours) that they spend in office, no one has a clue what they do between the dozens of cigarette breaks they take. There is virtually no communication with them even though they sit in the same office space. -Leadership is grandfathered in and have little to zero knowledge of compliance. They spend their time worrying about the step in and step out times of junior colleagues and the duration of their meal breaks. No conversations on work is ever done. - No vision, mission or purpose is ever communicated by the local management and all we hear is from the top global leadership through global talks. Individuals are hired to work on a single activity without definitive career plans drawn out for them. If they excel too much, the management gets insecure and tries to demotivate them. -This team and the office, work in a silo and unlike other global offices, global management doesn't visit the office. The local management takes advantage of this and runs it like a family business. Acquaintances and friends with zero track record are hired into the team and made to look like prodigies even though in their previous teams (where they spent a significant time), they were under performers. - Information, no matter how simple is withheld from the junior employees as a means to keep control. "Decisions" and those activities with visibility in front of the global management is only made by the "core team" of incompetent friends and acquaintances hiding inside meeting rooms. These acquaintances and "friends" have no training or idea about compliance but are elevated above those working on the same activity for over 2 years with an agenda to make them appear like they are indispensable to business. -Once employees complete a few years and the local management is clueless about their career trajectory, they are harassed by unnecessary emails about step-in and productivity so they leave while the "acquaintances" go about doing nothing all day under the watchful eyes of the management. Some employees have been lucky to escape this cycle.

My experience isn't universal, and there are some truly, TRULY terrible managers at GLG. These are the bad apples who don't let their employees take lunch, sick days, or vacation. (By the way, GLG -- your "no minimum vacation" policy is actively harmful when it means some employees take 30+ vacation days annually and other employees take 0, with NO ACCOUNTABILITY to the managers allowing this.) This isn't unique to GLG, but it is something the company must continue to work on if it intends to retain talent and improve these mixed Glassdoor reviews. There's a decent amount of flexibility to transfer to new teams IF the company thinks you're going to stick it out another 1-2 years, but I'm sympathetic for those who have tried to escape awful managers and been denied. Likewise, there are teams that are overstaffed and consistently blow past arbitrarily set goals despite leaving at 4pm every day, and teams that are understaffed, overworked, and penalized when they fall short of unreasonably high targets. The divide breeds resentment, and the aggressive growth rate isn't sustainable for all clients. GLG could attempt to solve for this (and overall work/life balance) with a queue system for new requests and follow-the-sun staffing, but still has far too much pride in how their elite clients value the account managers. It's not true, employees know it isn't true, but the antiquated idea persists. I'm hopeful it will change in the next 3-5 years. GLG's technology is abhorrently dysfunctional and frequently causes huge losses and mass employee frustration & panic. It's not uncommon for all systems to shut down, and new programs to be rolled out before being properly beta-tested. Compensation is directly tied to metrics, but those metrics can be hard to find and riddled with errors in the reporting. Employees spend countless hours building complicated Excel sheets to manage the most basic client data so we can have some hope of getting accurate numbers. There's a rumor that the CTO hired a team of his dev buddies to run things, and I have no idea if that's true, but it's the most plausible explanation for how terrible our systems are. Guys, I'm trying my very best here, but you've got to give us some better tools to work with. Lastly, GLG definitely has a diversity problem. The straight white Ivy frat boys who keep getting hired don't even like the job, because all of their buddies went directly to Wall Street or sexy marketing roles and are making better money. As long as the recruitment strategy continues to target top tier schools and rely heavily on referrals, this won't change. GLG just hired an experienced CHRO, so my hopes are up about the future of the gender/race demographics in the office, but this is a serious issue that's remaining solidly in the con category for now.