British Museum Reviews

* Sometimes impossible workload * Little to no opportunity for progression within the Museum * Higher ups seem terrified to address the Museum's past, and to be fair they do receive very negative responses from the public and supporters no matter what they do as there are very vocal people on both sides * A truly toxic culture in many departments. Only now that I have moved to a different workplace where psychological safety is a focus do I realise just how damaging the environment at the Museum was. Blame culture, micro-management, no prioritisation to help with workload, concerns about other colleagues' behaviour to do with sexism and bullying not actioned at all.

The Bad Quite a few of the people working at the museum are institutionalised to an incredible degree. Especially when it comes to support services like Marketing and Design they delight in being a great hindrance to anyone who tries to improve and modernise processes. To give an example – when the branding of the museum was renewed in 2012, the (outsourced) creative lead, engaged mostly for the fact that he was friends with one of the deputy directors, omitted providing guidelines for screen and digital design. This was essentially because he had been taken out of retirement, and famously 'didn't do computers'. The Ugly Frustration levels across the museum have gone up tremendously over the last couple of years. Staff are being laid off, in many cases without redundancy provisions, even though they have sufficient continuity of service. There is a huge discrepancy between official HR policies (which include annual top-down assessments, etc) and the reality, which caters to those that are inside the established segment (who literally have jobs 'made' for them) and the rest who have to dance for scraps in form of rolling three-month FTC extensions before eventually being shown the door. Emanating from the top, a disdainful bully culture is being promulgated and projected throughout the institution.