Ruska, 

Martin, 

Associates 

GmbH

Unternehmenskultur

What is most striking is the silence and in general the atmosphere of stress and tension that hovers in the air. All you can hear are mouse clicks and people sighing. Sometimes colleagues get fired when you least expect it. You are constantly checked and monitored that You are working (basically no trust at all). There is a feeling of being constantly watched and supervised, there is no space or room in the studio where you can work alone or being isolated from others. In general, the mood of the bosses very often affects creativity and team spirit in a negative way.

This is perhaps one of the biggest problems: most of the communication is done through e-Mail with misunderstandings on a daily basis. I find it absurd that they haven't yet found an alternative and smarter way to communicate than email (like Slack?). Then you receive e-Mails from the bosses very rude and humiliating, with tones above decency. Who do they think they are? Project management is chaotic, lacking any real structure, which simply reflects how the workflow has been managed over the years in the past. You start one project, continue another, stop another: everything is so chaotic that at the end it's hard to tell who did what and why…

Never had any kind of problem but you can feel how stressed out and unhappy the team is, frankly I don't know how the bosses don't get it, they probably prefer to look the other way (and you can see that by reading the fake positive reviews here on Kununu or the new profiles they create, quite sad). Don't rely too much on the know-how and skills of senior colleagues, they may decide to leave the agency when you least expect it. Consider that the team changes every six months. And usually when employees leave their jobs so often it is a symptom of a deep distress. Take note: they are always looking for designers. And they have been looking for a creative director since ever, which is pretty ridiculous. Even a secretary doesn't dare to stay more than a year here.

It seems to me a gamble to talk about work-life-balance. You work intensively daily for 8 hours with a 1-hour lunch break, use of mobile phones is forbidden by contract, no flexible or remote working, everyone has always a very long list of to-dos with tight deadlines for the day. There are days in which you are so overworked that you can't even look out of the window for a moment.

This deserves a separate chapter. They are the last to arrive at the agency and the first to leave, convinced to successfully run a business by acting like invisible leaders, when in fact they achieve the opposite result. Invisible are just their leadership skills. They are quite incapable of motivating the employees and especially of building a team that is efficient at their business goals. Goals that are very often opaque and not clear. The team changes all the time (designers leave or get fired), instead of investing in people and allowing them to grow, they prefer to hire junior designers, maybe from abroad, they don't have the same demands for money as the German ones and most likely they won't stay long. But what is most striking is the way they work, with mood swings and often at odds with each other. The worst moment is when they sit behind your back and tell you what to do on the screen, treating You more like a “tool” instead of a designer. Sometimes you feel like you are babysitting them. You might easily hate them for these behaviours, but in the end you just feel so sorry for them, they clearly need help.

Don't be fooled by what you see shown on their website, most of the projects were done more than five years ago, they are "vintage". More realistically speaking, you have the possibility to develop wine and cosmetic labels (for the only mainstream cosmetic brand they show on their website, from which they cannot accept further commissions from competitors). So in general: pretty repetitive work and for the same product categories. Very often technical skills such as proof and print file preparation are also required, skills that a designer should not usually have on a high level as there are art-workers for that. But since they are constantly squeezing costs you will also be asked to be an art-worker and a re-toucher. A separate chapter is also the way they ask you to work: rough and fast, quantity of design comes at the expense of quality, a mass of drafts that they dare to call “ideas”. Do You know “fast fashion"? Well here it is simply “fast design”, “inexpensive designs produced rapidly in response to the latest trends”. You are often asked to re-use and re-adapt ideas found online, which is not only deeply humiliating for a designer, but also ethically wrong.