As a Graduate, you don't realise how bad it is until you have left and work for a normal employer! - Principal Consultant Customer Systems Employee Review

Comments from Steve A Firstly, please see http://www.customersystems.com/employeefeedback So much of what I said in reply to the previous review is equally applicable here that I am inclined to refrain from repeating it here but rather to direct you to the review above I would like, however, to address the topics contained in [The HQ in Chertsey has the atmosphere of a morgue. Talking amongst peers, be it work related conversation or not, is strictly frowned upon..Vitorian nursery school..almost everything is banned.] Well, of course, working isn't banned and, if we're still paying you at a time when we we don't have a project to use you on, then expecting you to do some work isn't wholly unreasonable. Try to look at it like this just for a moment. If the office is filling up with people whose services we haven't sold, then we have a problem. Taken to its limit it can become a fatal problem for the company - It's really not a joke. Some of our competitors have gone to the knacker's yard because of just this problem. So this is a point of maximum stress for the people whose job it is to sell your services. Just at the point of maximum stress a whole bunch of extra people come into the office and the way they conduct themselves has a considerable effect on the poor folk for whom this office is their normal workplace. A truly mature way to act would be to ask what you can do to help with the sales process and so gain some extra skills which could turn out to be precious to you in later life. Buckling down to whatever technical work you are assigned is also perfectly OK. But when a group of consultants arrive, who to be fair, have probably just worked very hard on the project they have just completed but now see time on the office as holiday camp time and show no consideration for others, this is really just a way of multiplying the stress of the people trying to dig the sales situation out of a hole. So, having loud lengthy conversations about non-work related subjests is very unwelcome. Some people also, through not fault of their own just have loud voices and even work-related discussions if conducted loudly and lengthily within earshot of others trying to concentrate, is unfair. What is asked of people in this situation is that they take their lengthy loud work-related conversation off into a meeting room of which we have plenty. Also, [As a Graduate, you don't realise how bad it is until you have left and work for a normal employer!] Some people are comfortable working for what might be called a normal employer. Personally, I always strived, when I was an employee rather than a business owner, to work for extraordinary companies rather than normal ones. There is no doubt that, in extraordinary organisations, life can be less comfortable for people who crave 'normality'. In the extraordinary organisations I worked in, conflict, arguments, passion, extreme hard work etc were not unknown and conventional notions of comfort were not typical. For me, averageness is not a goal. So there is an element here of each to his own taste. What I do want to stress is that, should you ever try to form your own business (and I mean a real business - not a personal service company) please don't aim for it to be normal. Big companies can survive being normal. Small ones can't survive without substantial differentiation.