Pros
Work / life balance is OK. Employees at my level are actively encouraged to work from home 1, 2 or 3 days per week. During the day there's a lot of freedom to go about doing your thing without having people hover over you. As an employee you're treated as an adult with appropriate give and take. The company is also by far the most global I've ever been a part of. Many companies claim to be global by nature of having offices everywhere. But at HSBC there is far more global collaboration than what I've experienced elsewhere. If you serve your time, there are opportunities to move internationally as well. The majority of people I work with are not from Canada even though we all work out of the same office now. On the whole, corporate values are fairly open. Right now for example, HSBC is sponsoring a few events for World Pride. Internally there are posters encouraging employees to participate in Pride events as well. World Cup 2014 is currently in full swing in Brazil and many employees are taking full advantage of excellent TV coverage to watch games, participate in pools etc. So there is definitely a light-hearted aspect of HSBC which is embraced.
Cons
I consider my pay to be low. The time-off policy is not overly restrictive, but it's an oddity to me in that you get x days off (depends on seniority) but if you're sick that counts as time off. So you're not supposed to take 100% of your time off as vacation, but rather leave a day or 2 "in the bank" just in case you get sick. The biggest con of HSBC Canada though is that there's no sense of urgency in anything and thus no sense of direction. To me it feels like I'm working with a gigantic blob of Jello. The mass kind of jiggles and moves in a direction that's roughly forward, but it's really slow going. And when you contribute your bit, the mass just kind of jiggles some more without really feeling like there's forward momentum. Without a sense of urgency, everything just slows down as people ease up. So we end up doing stupid things like creating spreadsheets which then need to be manually copied to Powerpoint which then gets emailed out as an update which no one really pays attention to anyway. But hey - we have a deck and somehow that's perceived as being a Good Thing. People development does not seem to be a priority either. As a new hire I was thrown 20 or so web-based trainings (which taught me nothing new really) and I got to attend a couple of conference call / trainings. Other than that, I find I need to rely on my own initiative to learn how stuff really works at HSBC and who does what. There is essentially no formal training for on boarding a new employee and as far as I can tell, no policy for internal training let alone external third-party training courses. I suppose if I build a case and ask I might be allowed to attend some course somewhere, but it's up to me and my initiative. I don't think HSBC will proactively initiate training unless it's another web-based compliance thing.
