kununu Prüfprozess
17 Mitarbeiter:innen haben diesen Arbeitgeber mit durchschnittlich 3,0 Punkten auf einer Skala von 1 bis 5 bewertet.
Meisterlabs does have its share of positives. The people are genuinely warm and there’s a good sense of camaraderie within teams. The benefits for employees are commendable and the central office location is convenient. However, these advantages are overshadowed by significant cultural and operational issues.
Leadership and Strategy: The company lacks a clear strategy, leading to constant changes and instability. Over the past year, there have been multiple departures in the leadership team, causing the sales team to adapt to more than one different leadership styles and strategic directions in just 12 months. Projects were often started, then abruptly redirected or abandoned, resulting in confusion and inefficiency.
Disproportionate Leadership to Staff Ratio: There is an imbalance in the number of leadership roles compared to executory staff. This has created a top-heavy structure that hampers effective decision-making and execution.
Overwhelmed Sales Team: The sales team, in particular, has been overwhelmed. With two key leaders working remotely from abroad while attempting to establish a sales presence in Austria, there has been a lack of cohesive and sustainable direction.
Sudden Terminations: Terminations often came without warning or explanation, adding to the overall uncertainty and lack of trust within the company.
In summary, while Meisterlabs offers some great benefits and has a friendly team environment, the lack of clear leadership and strategy, coupled with sudden changes and terminations, significantly undermines the potential for a sustainable and productive work environment.
I believe that decisive action is required, especially given the current economic situation, particularly concerning IT sales. Meisterlabs offers a good product, but in times like these, it may not be seen as an essential tool for businesses.
Strategic adjustments and a more stable leadership approach could help Meisterlabs better navigate these challenging times and maintain its relevance and value in the market.
- the individuals who joined Meister before all the layoffs started
- the salary is generally good or very good (not for people who joined before the investment)
- the office is beautiful and has everything you need or could possibly dream of
- cool product
- constant layoffs and a lack of accountability on a senior management level
- having let Meister turn into a company where people are afraid to speak up
- allowing corporate politics where individuals who kiss up to their superiors get better opportunities
- constant change of strategy and tactics = projects are stopped in the middle or close before the finish line. This way, nothing much ever gets done.
- pretending that constant layoffs are normal - do you really think anybody buys this?
- very high fluctuation
- micromanagement
- develop a clear strategy and stick to it for longer than 2 months
- stop telling people that there will be no more layoffs when they happen more or less on a monthly basis
- start taking accountability for mistakes that happened at the top level instead of making individual team members pay for them
- stop playing politics and giving more opportunities to team members and lower management who kiss up to their seniors
- be transparent in job interviews that it could be a fun, exciting and well-paid gig, but that chances are that it will last one year maximum no matter how well you perform or how hard you work - then people can make an informed decision whether this is what they want for themselves at this stage of their lives
It has been fun for a long time. The team sticks together, the office is beautiful and Meister organizes fun events.
The atmosphere has deteriorated since layoffs started in 2022. Now, there have been so many waves of "restructuring", "rightsizing" etc. and regular (about monthly) terminations that people either leave on their own terms, people have become numb and disassociate or they keep their heads down because they fear that they will be next. There are now more cases of diagnosed or suspected burn-out.
To add a bit more context to the layoffs: I believe no department has been spared so far and in almost all cases, layoffs were not performance-oriented (people with the highest sales numbers and the best performance evaluations were also laid off).
It depends on who you ask. I'd say that within the Austrian start-up bubble, Meister has a good reputation because the company did a lot of things well for a long time. Outside of this bubble, nobody knows Meister, so there's no good or bad image.
It really depends. There are people with weeks of overtime and others work exactly their contractual 38.5 hours per week. Meister is at least sticking to the law and you can use the hours you've built up as overtime, also entire days or weeks.
There is 10% time, but this is handled very differently in each team. Some may use it fully, others will not have time for it at all. In my case, I unfortunately never got to use it.
Meister pays (quite) well and I assume it will have to continue to do so because people don't come for the culture anymore. However, there has been an ongoing rumour that people who started before the investment still earn significantly less than their peers who joined after.
In terms of salary increases due to the collective agreement, Meister has not communicated as regularly and as clearly as me and several colleagues hoped for based on Meister’s general goal of transparency, so this feels a bit... unexpected?
See my comment about how elder team members and some people without an Austrian passport were treated during layoffs.
What makes Meister a great company are the individual team members. For a long time, people were hired not only for their skills and experience, but also for cultural fit and that paid of. It's easy to get along with your colleagues, they are smart, fun and usually really kind people.
There used to be team members above in their early 50s, but apart from that, there aren't any anymore. While they worked at Meister, my impression was that they were never treated differently in the sense of worse because of their age. However, not enough thought was given to them during the layoffs and that it might be harder for them to find new jobs. BTW this was also an issue for some people who moved to Austria to work at Meister.
For the longest time, Meister has been struggling to define where they want to go, which go-to-market strategy to follow and which target groups to address. This has led to a constant flip-flopping from one approach to another leading to many cancelled projects just before the finish line, high opportunity costs and frustration among the team. In combination with micro-management from top-level executives, this is a difficult situation to be in.
The lack of a strategy has been pointed out numerous times, but was never taken seriously. Instead, external consultants have been brought on. Their opinion was valued a lot higher than the opinion of entire teams of seniors. Meister now prefers to hire individuals from other SaaS companies in the productivity and collaboration space that come with "a playbook". It seems to me that the assumption is that just because the person worked at the competition, they automatically know more than any other person at Meister (no matter their seniority or experience) and that whatever was done at a competitor's, can be easily implemented at Meister and will automatically work. Obviously, this hasn't worked.
The office is really beautiful and located right on Vienna's busiest shopping street. This means that their are ample opportunities for grabbing lunch or coffee. The garden is also really beautiful.
I like that there are these nooks you can use when the open-plan office is too loud.
Meister has a high number of individuals with excellent communication skills. However, this is no longer seen as important for leadership positions as it used to be (e.g., verbal aggression from high-level executives to lower management, a high-level executive calling mental health "the responsibility of individuals" rather than the company during mental health awareness month, HR denying that there would be more layoffs when lower management asked for help on dealing with the anxiety in their departments and teams etc.). I want to be clear that in comparison to other companies, Meister at least communicates and often does so well. However, it seems that this is no longer deemed essential, which leads me to assume that things will go downhill.
Of course it's still better to be a white male like in almost every (SaaS) company, but in terms of skin color, origin and religious beliefs, my impression is that people are treated equally and fair. However, when you look at how many women are in senior leadership positions or how many people of color there are, well... It's still a SaaS company.
The work can be very exciting as the individuals you work with are very talented. What's less exciting is the constant stop-and-go motion due to frequent strategy changes, micromanagement or general fatigue after another round of layoffs.
Flexibilität
Aufgaben
Kollegen und Kolleginnen
Atmosphäre
Teamevents
Freie Arbeitseinteilung
Sehr träge und nicht agil
Viel Wechsel auf Führungsebene
Keine wirkliche Strategie
Keine sichere Lebensplanung möglich
Für Stabilität sorgen
Länger an eine Strategie glauben und daran festhalten
Kündigungen (nicht nur von mir) nicht wirklich nachvollziehbar. Argumente für Kündigung sind meist identisch - ohne ins Detail zu gehen.
Salary
The team spirit in individual departments. There were very cool personalities in the company who, unfortunately, are gradually leaving or being kicked out.
Individuals in management make decisions based on subjective opinions.
Unfortunately, much of the company's work is now based on who likes whom. Thus, relevant positions are excluded from important meetings/decisions and not informed. It has become a constant selling of people's roles. If you are lucky and you are seen, you can do the job you are hired for.
It's not much about teamwork anymore. You also notice that the people who have been hired in the last 6-12 months have a different mentality. It's a lot about the own ego.
That a consultant from America came in for 3 months, who has the US glasses on and does not understand what the company was unique for in the beginning. Without further ado, it was decided to reduce the marketing team by almost 50%.
Put management in place that knows what it's doing and has a plan and objectives set. The strategy should also not be changed every few weeks, because it does not achieve the - often not very realistic - goals. Employees were let go because there is no strategy in place and no departmental goals were set (The company's hierarchy is not working). As a result, lay-offs are happening and people are dismissed who are said not to have achieved the goals.
Learn to trust the employees and refrain from micro-management. Employees are hired and then have to sell their roles and prove why it's a good thing they've been hired.
The company should establish a hierarchy and it should work properly.
The management should learn that in this highly competitive environment it is not enough to copy the competition.
The company should live the set values. There is talk of being courageous and trying things out, but when employees do so, the Management backs down on the basis of subjective decisions.
Management has no trust in employees, people are hired and kicked out after a very short time because they do not meet expectations.
The management does not adhere to their set hierarchies, many decisions were made over department heads.
Communication within the company does not work, everything happens on Slack, there is no filtering of information. Hierarchical coordination does not work. Employees with management responsibility are ignored - when once again headless decisions are made quickly.
If you're happy enough that your role is still seen as important and you get along well with key people in the company, then you'll have interesting projects too
The way they treated people during the layoff. The ones that were affected just received a mail where they were informed that they were fired and some were locked out of their computers even before theyreceived the notification.
Better think first before you hire dozens of people. There were so many that have just startet 2 or 3 months before they were fired again. Most of them left good jobs and were suddenly unemployed.
Lack of micro management. Freedom and responsibility in a lot of areas. Yearly retreats
Communication of company plans.
Make stock options available to employees. Create a clear policy on remote work. More flexible core hours as policy (sometimes practised, but not on paper which is confusing). Better rewards for overtime.
There are opportunities to attend conferences and work on new tech in "innovation week" (start of every quarter)
No stock options which is disappointing considering the company is happy to take on investment from external sources. Wages could also be better
You can choose you own equipment in most cases, flexi desks don't have standard monitor / desks which can be annoying
Important company decisions (like whether to take on investment or whether to move to a flexi desk system) are only communicated when a decision is made.
Egal in welcher Position man bei Meister arbeitet, Ideen und Vorschläge, die man einbringt, werden immer ernst genommen. Man bekommt Startups-Feeling, mit einer guten Portion Stabilität und Sicherheit.
Kommunikationswege sind nicht immer klar strukturiert, auf Grund des schnellen Mitarbeiterzuwachs.
Tolle Kollegen und wunderschönes Büro, was dazu bewegt auch gerne Freizeit da zu verbringen.
Flexible Arbeitszeiten, Sportliche Aktivitäten, Chill-Out-Area
Es werden einem viele Möglichkeiten zur Weiterbildung angeboten. Seminare im In-/Ausland, Online Weiterbildungen, Sprachkurse, etc.
Offener und freundlicher Umgang mit Kollegen.
Respektvoll und aufgeschlossen für neue Ideen.
Einfach und unkompliziert. Keine hierarchischen Barrieren.
Das bunte Meister-Logo repräsentiert die Diversität, welche ein wichtiger Teil des Unternehmens ist.