Pros
In many ways, working at Bottomline is just your average, monotonous office job. That’s one of the nicest things I can say about this company. Fruit bowls in the office, although sometimes under-provisioned, are a welcome touch. Employees are given free food each fortnight, alternately breakfast bacon/sausage rolls (under the sickly guise of ‘Happy Monday’) and pizza. All this, but no healthcare plan. Trying to kill us off?
Cons
Growing too quickly for its infrastructure. The company is trying to double revenue every three years, yet ploughs so little of that money back into its increasingly overstretched systems that the whole thing is likely to come tumbling down at any minute. Growth is through acquisition and the process seems to be: 1. buy company that’s turning over a decent profit by selling better software 2. make majority of the acquired company’s staff redundant 3. take over their customers in order to sell them Bottomline’s archaic software instead. This is an American company and as such you can expect ‘mission statements’, motivational posters & regularly updated boiler plates, overbearing middle management requiring constant progress meetings, a total commitment to maximising short term profit and dictation from the US board regardless of your own local market. It’s embarrassing to be involved with a company that claims to have fantastic customer service (there’s even a pitiful ‘customer service’ campaign with logos and mottos to convince people of this) but which has the highest ratio I’ve ever come across of unhappy to satisfied customers. The fastest growing department is human resources. They need extra people to handle all the redundancies and resignations! Second is marketing, who are needed to create the motivational posters and customer service propaganda. One part of the Reading office is bolted on to the Crown Prosecution Service building, with shallow airless work spaces. The other is an ex-warehouse office building with barely any natural light, with nowhere to go to escape the ‘work area’. In general the office atmosphere is muted and formal, making it a particularly unpleasant place to work. Middle-senior management is a boys club. Not to say that it necessarily needs more women, but people in those positions should adjust their behaviour to lose some macho bravado and make some more level-headed decisions.