ICON reviews

Management does not care about its employees at all. The workload has increased significantly over the past few years with no increase in salary to compensate. The company seems to content to have staff leave after a year instead of trying anything to keep them around. No investments at all in IT or support services unless it makes things cheaper. The company motto should be 'as long as we can do it cheaper, we don't really care how it will impact quality or job satisfaction!'. Communication is all top-down, there's no way whatsoever to get a message from the bottom up unless 17 layers of management decide to push. Ah, there's the yearly survey which is so obviously rigged to show improvement it feels North Korean. Any bonus payout is distributed so unequally between senior and lower staff even this nice gesture generates frustration on the floor. There's a lot of very smart, friendly and well-intentioned people at ICON and working there was great, but senior management's RyanAir approach to clinical research cannot last forever.

Layoffs. Promotional freeze (originally in IHCRA program and most IHCRAs are still waiting after 1.5-2 years, if they haven't left already). 2 years with no promotion, only a lateral move (even though the site activation associate position involves much more work/stress), and a performance-based merit increase, which varies depending on how well the company performs. Second performance ranking was higher than the first and got less of an increase. No bonuses. No "off-cycle" promotions allowed - can only happen during the annual performance review period. Salaries are lower than other companies. A lot of us got the crappy end of the stick, were supposed to be making much more had CRA promotions occurred, and they don't care. "It's just business". New hires that have joined the "Site Activation Initiative", have joined as SSUA II so most likely, they are making more money, even though the hires I have interacted with do not have study start-up/site activation experience. Any SSUA II openings I have seen internally were in other countries. Made to train those that are coming in as SSUA II.