Great employees, laughably bad management and work culture.
Gut am Arbeitgeber finde ich
Good colleagues and occasionally intersting projects, but this is overshadowed by everything else.
Schlecht am Arbeitgeber finde ich
Incompetent management and HR, rude tone, bad organization and communication, absolutely awful work-life balance, micromanagement to a ridiculous degree, harassment from superiors. Unpaid overtime, low wages.
Verbesserungsvorschläge
Finally take some responsibility for your actions and start taking serious steps to improving the company. Learn how to trust your employees and delegate tasks. Work on your leadership skills and think long and hard why essentially your entire staff is turned over once a year before the company is driven fully into the ground.
Arbeitsatmosphäre
There is a constant feeling of unease and people yelling at each other in the office. In the rare moments of quiet, you can usually hear management gossiping about employees who are often sitting in the same room. Sensitive HR topics are discussed in front of the entire staff and a large portion of management’s day is spent harassing employees and starting drama for the sake of it.
Working here is needlessly exhausting and stressful. There is a complete absence of documentation of processes and any sort of guideline is made up on the spot by management and can change within literal minutes.
Kommunikation
Communication both internally and to collaborators is abysmal. Employees are usually informed last minute about tasks and then forced to do overtime, because everything is "urgent". Timelines, clear responsibilities and structure are foreign concepts in this company. The tone of communication is usually very condescending ("can you use your head for once", "can't you see it, you have eyes", “is it too difficult for you?”)
Employees also get unwanted phone calls and text messages late in the evening or on weekends, on their personal phones. Most of communication from management is done between 11 pm and 1 am with one-liner emails that are sent to seemingly random employees. People will get an email at 1 am informing them they have to be in the office by 8 am the next day and then get yelled at next morning for not "showing up on time".
Kollegenzusammenhalt
The employees are really the only quality of this company. Employees get along very well and work great as a team even across departments. That is until upper management steps in and kills projects with relentless micromanagement. Management does not like people getting along, employees talking to one another inside the office is frowned upon and will get punished by upper management.
Additionally certain team members were banned from having lunch together and management has a habit of spreading rumors about other employees in an attempt to pit employees against one another.
Work-Life-Balance
I wish there was an option to give this 0/5 stars. Having a life outside of work is actively discouraged in this place. According to management "you either have a career or you have a life outside of work, you can't have both". They will also “never hire people with children again".
Overtime is expected and not compensated for, even if the contract states a clear number of working hours. Hours worked are logged via time logging software, but it is completely meaningless as hours aren't compensated or even looked at to begin with.
Working on weekends is asked for occasionally (on very short notice) and hours worked on weekends are compensated with additional holidays (at a 1-1 ratio, there is no additional compensation).
People are looked at suspiciously and harassed for trying to leave on time, and also after working multiple hours of overtime.
Employees get berated for getting up from their desks to grab coffee or go to the bathroom. Breaks do not exist in this company (at least for employees, management will often leave for hours in the middle of the day).
Vorgesetztenverhalten
The behavior of management towards employees is abhorrent. Every day a new person is targeted and gets harassed in front of everyone. Focusing on work is extremely difficult as employees get their name called up to 20 times a day just so management can vent their frustrations at them. Employees are regarded as property as expected to behave accordingly. Management will never take responsibility for any wrongdoing and always point the finger at employees, even if they were not even involved in the topic at hand.
Micromanagement is considered the key to success here: Every decision in this company, no matter how small, has to go through upper management, because no one else is trusted to make decisions in this place. As a result, the company is hilariously inefficient and employees are expected to do overtime to compensate for that. Also, people in home office get constant harassing phone calls to check if they're actually working (and accusing them of not doing so if they don't pick up the phone on the first ring).
Interessante Aufgaben
The work itself is fairly interesting, although repetitive. Because the company is small there is the opportunity to work on a variety of topics so that is a plus.
Gleichberechtigung
Women are treated just as badly as male employees so that can be considered equalty. Female employees are always looked at suspiciously, because they might (plan to) have children.
Umgang mit älteren Kollegen
Older colleagues are treated just as badly as younger employees.
Arbeitsbedingungen
Positives: Employees are given stand-up desks and good IT equipment. The office is fairly large and well decorated with large windows and natural light. Coffee is provided and free, there is a fridge and microwave for employees to use. The place is well connected to public transport via the S4 train.
Negatives: The noise level is often unbearable. People in charge will have constant phone calls over loudspeaker and refuse to go into meeting rooms (of which two exist and are always free to use), instead they will force everyone else to be quiet and forbid them to use the printer or coffee machine. The air in the office is not very pleasant, especially later in the day.
Umwelt-/Sozialbewusstsein
Only money counts and people are seen as a resource to exploit. Employee's well-being is of no concern, for example regarding Coronavirus: The way this company handled the COVID-19 pandemic is completely reckless and careless. Despite instructions from the federal government to let people work from home, employees were forced to come to the office. All, and I mean literally all jobs in this company can be done remotely. Even workers that were showing symptoms were forced to come to the office, this was justified with "I need you here" and "it's a nightmare to call people all day".
Gehalt/Sozialleistungen
The majority of employees is grossly underpaid, especially considering the amount of unpaid overtime. People are strung along with promises of promotions, but promotions are usually just a meaningless job title change, additional work getting thrown at people and a further excuse to abuse employees.
The only employees getting anything close to competitive salaries are interns. However, this needs to be taken with a grain of salt, as there are no learning opportunities provided here. Formal training and personal development is completely non-existent and interns largely do the same work as full-time employees just at a lower wage, so really they get exploited just like the rest.
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Most employees dread working here and leave as soon as another opportunity comes along. The existing reviews on this website paint an accurate picture of the company (by the way all the suspicious reviews above 4 stars are fake.)
Karriere/Weiterbildung
Career prospective at the company are very bleak, as a result the employee turnover is laughably high. There is a lot of talk about “loyalty”, but management will do everything in their power to make sure employees leave the company as soon as a better opportunity comes along. There is no incentive to stay at the company. The few employees who have been at the company long-term are treated just as badly as the other employees, in many cases even worse.