This company is the quintessential example of the drawbacks of working for a large corporation. I cannot in good conscience recommend this company as a place of employment to anyone.
At the broadest level, the company markets itself as “world-shapers… with commitment to making a positive impact,” while its biggest and most cherished clients are some of the world’s most notoriously unethical and unscrupulous contributors to environmental damage and the war machine.
Its senior and director-level leadership in the U.S. comprises an “old boy’s club” of nepotistic hires who have no technical skillset and who are criminally out-of-touch with their workforce. The misguided pace of acquisitions and lack of consistent or logical organizational structure is a result of two conflicting impulses: the blind intention to grow without coherent, long-term strategic planning and the unwillingness to demote/remove/hold accountable each other at this level of leadership.
Instead the consequences of these actions fall upon the most frontline workers within the company: consultants, technical experts, analysts, marketers, and their lower management levels. As an employee for this company, regardless of your department, you can expect to be overworked and without resources; shuffled around to different teams or roles without warning or input; and held accountable to ever-changing policies regarding workflow, performance, and pay.
More recently, likely due to an industrial recession and the de-funding of public clients, the company has also begun to attempt to save costs by replacing its skilled laborers with cheap and inexperienced hires outsourced internationally. So employees can also expect to work more and more alongside coworkers whose working hours, inexperience, and language barriers are impediments to their daily workflow. This is in no way the fault of their international teammates, who are genuinely doing everything they can to rise to these new roles, and who also feel a great amount of pressure to perform well in this circumstance.
Which brings me, finally, to the company’s “people culture.” I have worked across several industries and for other companies within this industry and the people culture at WSP is by far the most toxic, fear-based, duplicitous one I have ever experienced. Because this company is led by a group of people who would rather ignore, sweep under the rug, or altogether remove anyone or -thing who might speak against them, instances of gross (and often illegal) misconduct abound across every department and in every region.
I advise prospective employees to stay far, far away from this company. And I advise my former colleagues to stay grounded and stick by one another.
