Nice atmosphere, great product, pleasant colleagues, but chaotic management, lack of benefits, and bad location
Gut am Arbeitgeber finde ich
- Unique culture with a lot of great, open-minded, and very smart people
- High degree of autonomy and a lot of trust in employees
- Interesting product
- Collaboration between colleagues is excellent
Schlecht am Arbeitgeber finde ich
- Not enough individual development possibilities. There is no clearly structured, substantial process for promoting employees (only annual review talks, which is not enough)
- Terrible Munich location
- The clear focus on a competence culture sometimes prevents people from admitting mistakes or ignorance, because they are afraid of looking incompetent. Some people need more support, but won't admit it, leading to further problems down the line
Verbesserungsvorschläge
- With all the employees leaving at the moment, maybe need to rethink the benefits structure and bring it up to current market conditions. A nice culture and ok-ish salary is not enough to retain good people when others are offering so much more.
- Think about the environment and the way the company is run. Climate change is real and very threatening and everyone has a responsibility to act.
- Formulate and communicate a clear vision of where the ship is heading. And this should not be a top-down thing, but something the employees have a say in.
- Provide a fixed time and financial budget for external trainings.
Arbeitsatmosphäre
The atmosphere amongst colleagues is very open and collaborative. There are hardly any toxic, destructive politics that are so common in other companies. Management could be more open and outgoing, especially one of the owners.
Kommunikation
A lot the important and relevant communication is happening informally. Often, it is a pull model, whereby one needs to become active to remain in the loop.
Kollegenzusammenhalt
Great.
Work-Life-Balance
A lot of autonomy and trust when it comes to things like home office and working hours.
Vorgesetztenverhalten
Some managers have their favourite employees, which they treat quite well, whilst neglecting many others. Favoritism is an issue. There is often very little transparency when it comes to who gets promoted and who doesn't advance. Personal initiatives and ideas need to be promoted a lot more. Often, they are just ignored by management, which is very frustrating and demotivating (maybe this will get better with that new ideas initiative).
Interessante Aufgaben
The technology is very complex and interesting. The company tries very hard (and often successfully) to stay on top of developments. It never gets boring and is always challenging enough to remain interesting.
Gleichberechtigung
Very diverse and international bunch of people who get along surprisingly well.
Umgang mit älteren Kollegen
No age-ism.
Arbeitsbedingungen
The Munich HQ has terrible location. It's hard to reach by public transport and so too many people use cars. The furniture is far form ergonomic and quite few a people are suffering form back problems, for instance. There is a "health room" with nothing in it.
Umwelt-/Sozialbewusstsein
Hardly any. Some individual initiatives are sometimes supported, but being green is not part of the company DNA and highly neglected, probably mainly due to the owners attitude (e.g. flying to Amsterdam instead of taking the train).
Gehalt/Sozialleistungen
The salary is competitve enough, but there are no benefits on top of that (or maybe they are very well hidden)
Image
Image has recently taken a dip, due to the management chaos, but is generally still quite good, mostly due to the sophisticated and flexible technology.
Karriere/Weiterbildung
Hardly any options for personal, formal advancement. Training and education is mostly happening internally. External events, like conferences, have to be negotiated on a case-by-case basis and sometimes partly paid for by the employee.
Arbeitgeber-Kommentar
Dear colleague,
many thanks for your review and for taking your time to look at and rate censhare from so many different angles. It is very good to read that you enjoy working for us, we also think that our open-minded and international culture is very unique.
However, you also list up a couple of aspects we have to improve. Indeed, with the performance management approach you mention a topic that is on the top of our HR agenda for 2019. We have already announced this project in the monthly management meeting and we will come back to all employees as soon as we have defined the details of the how, when and what. From my perspective, this goes along with a better definition of individual development possibilities and a clearer perspective reg. career opportunities (e.g. is a management career or a specialist career more appropriate for the individual?)
Regarding the benefits, let's talk personally. There is a bunge of things we are offering, maybe this is simply not clear: our company pension plan, the gym pass (sports) program, different German classes, lunch offer, flexible working hours and home office regulations etc., just to name some.
Again, many thanks for your review and please don't hesitate to contact me in case of any questions or suggestions.
Kind regards,
Your P&O Team