Casual, traditional and slow to change
Pros
Casual, relaxed culture, great dedicated people, cool IT office in Shoreditch, recognised brand. Great work/life balance in tech and head office.
Cons
Good people dominated by incompetent leaders. Change is extremely slow and feared by management. Too many parts of the business value complacency over the initiative. Employees are afraid to speak up in fear of retribution from managers. Top management seems to have been selected through some sort of personal connections to the family owning the business. Otherwise, it's hard to explain the appalling incompetence of so many top leaders. Culturally the business still operates in the command and control model where a manager is supposed to know everything better, which makes it very hard for the company to adapt to the changing realities of the high street. Managers routinely withhold access to information from employees in fear of having their decisions challenged. Very old school and very unprofessional in the age of 'Amazon economy'.
