The way employees are incented does not encourage collaboration at all. This is true among the analyst community who has to focus on meeting consulting goals and there's little incentive for them to collaborate with other analysts if they want to meet their aggressive quarterly goals. People are sneaky in order to preserve projects for themselves and in these cases, most certainly do not put the client first.
Sales people don't seem to care much at all what projects are good business for the company (i.e., can/should we do the work?). Their focus is solely on selling the project and moving onto the next thing and many of them don't seem to care about the success or failure of what was sold. Again, client is not first. Sales people are very aggressive and sometimes rude when working with internal teams in order to push their own agenda and make their quarterly number (i.e., raise or lower the price or complete something within a completely unrealistic timeline). When you don't work on commission, there is little reason to want to cooperate with people who use bullying techniques to get you to do what they want.
In many different parts of the company, there is zero work-life balance. In order to just keep your head above water, it's necessary to work most nights and on weekends. This is mostly because you're on the phone 6+ hours a day and every client call involves 2 internal calls (one before a client call to make sure the account team is aligned and another call following the client call to align internally on next steps). This severely cuts into each and every day and makes it nearly impossible to be productive during normal business hours. The feeling is that you are expected to be on-call in order to pounce on an opportunity.
The exception to this work-life balance seems to be the benefits department who work part time, never answer their phone, respond to emails, or assist in any valuable way. I probably would have been much happier pursuing a career in that department!
Management seems to understand these shortcomings but does nothing to rectify the situation.
