Amazing people but the company lacks long-term vision
Gut am Arbeitgeber finde ich
- The amazing colleagues
- Weekly team lunches & breakfast
- Equipment (Apple hardware, home office equipment)
- Mental & physical health initiatives
- Linz office is pretty cool from an architectural point of view, Vienna office is very convenient
- They really tried to make the off-boarding process for laid-off employees as easy as possible and provided support (kudos to the People & Culture team!)
- Meetups & parties are really fun
Schlecht am Arbeitgeber finde ich
- Lack of vision from leadership
- Too many cooks spoil the broth: Often there were many people with different agendas involved in one project, making it hard to work in an agile & fast way. This causes the company to lose valuable time to respond to the changing customer & market needs.
Verbesserungsvorschläge
- Be more transparent if the company is struggling.
- Appreciate and support your in-house talent. There are so many knowledgable
people in the company that would be dearly missed if they ever left smec.
Arbeitsatmosphäre
Depends on the team. In my case, the overall work environment was very good, transparent & open. It was a pleasure to work with highly-motivated people. However, this positive vibe is not the norm for every department/team. Especially client-facing units seemed to struggle due to competitiveness between the teams.
Kommunikation
smec prides itself on communicating openly & transparently (e.g. through meet ups & townhall meetings), but only if it's something positive. The bad news about the company you'll only hear through the grapevine. One specific example: They started booking rooms for employees for a company event only a few days before laying off a significant amount of people. No signs from leadership that the company was struggling before, but many people already suspected something like this had to happen.
Kollegenzusammenhalt
In my team it was excellent
Work-Life-Balance
Depends on the department or team you work in. While there were some fixed meetings throughout the week, the rest of the working day was rather flexible. They allow home office for 2 days a week. Unfortunately, their remote work policy to work from abroad is rather rigid.
Vorgesetztenverhalten
Sometimes it seemed like leadership was relying on their gut feeling instead of data when making decisions. Ad hoc changes in strategy and re-prioritizations were very common, making work unpredictable. Employees are rarely asked for their opinions.
Gleichberechtigung
C-level is male-only and only a couple of women are in leading positions. Other than that it seems that whoever is friends with the higher-ups gets the promotion - it's getting more and more political.
Umgang mit älteren Kollegen
There were only few older employees
Arbeitsbedingungen
Good equipment, however no adjustable desks in the Linz office (only in Vienna)
Umwelt-/Sozialbewusstsein
Waste separation, organic snacks, collecting donations for Ukraine & Christmas - so it could be more
Gehalt/Sozialleistungen
Industry-average
Image
Depends on who you ask - outside of the online retail sector barely anyone knows them. They try really hard to keep up their good employee ratings to be attractive to talent.