The below points highlight the main concerns that came to my attention:
- every interaction and every facet of each department is highly political, your every step is watched and judged
- nepotism
- most of the good positions/promotions are given to new hires that have some previous relationship with the management team (either their ex-colleagues or ex-students or people they know through their close network). These new hires take time to learn the systems or products and most often than not are given some "projects" to run while the remaining personnel has to pick up the slack and make sure that daily tasks are complete. The new hires often put pressure on personnel to help with the "projects" as well as they don't have the proper system or product expertise.
- employees are penalized for speaking up
- a lot of favoritism, people get promoted solely based on management's personal preferences. People who are "in favor" are not held accountable for their work the same way than others.
- protectionism, people who are "protected" by a leader are not held to the same standards than others and are given preferential treatment
- very stressful environment, high volume workloads for some people while others are just enjoying the ride
- very outdated and not user-friendly technology
- no real diversity or women initiatives, the programs that are created are just for a facade. Participants for such programs are cherry-picked behind closed doors
- HR personnel is heavily influenced by the management team, the staff avoids sharing the thoughts and concerns openly as it might trickle down to the management.
- poor communication between the teams and the departments. This applies to both day to day business-related matters as well as any administrative communications. All the decisions made by the leadership team (including hiring a new employee, employee's promotion, employee's dismissal, new structure of the department or the team etc) are kept in a secret for as long as possible and shared only with specific people when the withholding of information is no longer possible. Such low visibility and transparency on staff's changes helps to mask high turnover, favoritism and low expertise retention within the company.
