Pros
Depending on which department you work in, there is a fair amount of autonomy in your day-to-day work. That’s not to say you get to make decisions (or even feed into them) because the higher ups tend to have all the decision making power and then it gets fed down the chain as to what has to be done. That said, if you get a decent manager or are a decent manager, how you approach what has to be done is up to you. The company spends a lot of time and money in courses and training for staff, everything from learning how to better your persuasive writing skills through to their two internal development schemes: Contributor to Manager and Manager to Leader. How much you take advantage of these opportunities is up to you but again, if you have a good manager they’ll encourage you to take up as many as possible where your workload allows. Depending on which department you work in and which side of the company there are (or were, pre-COVID) good chances for development. There is a big focus on hiring from within so if you spot an internal opportunity that you have transferable skills for, they’re very open to applications. Barring the leadership levels, the people you work with are great – it’s a diverse, fun workforce who work really hard and take pride in what they do. There were good opportunities for international travel pre-COVID and travelling with fun colleagues made it even better. Bonus was having business class for flights over 4h. That was scrapped when COVID hit unfortunately. But the people you work with are one of the greatest pros. The offices are nice, well laid out and mostly open plan with the C levels having their own offices plus a variety of meeting rooms which were invariably booked up well in advance. Good perks in the office such as catered happy hours and other evening activities, coffee, drinks fridges, pastries etc etc. There’s also a table tennis table and various other games in the staff kitchen.
Cons
Pretty much everything that the negative reviews on here have said rings true for me. It is very easy for an organization to appear to be a great organization to work for when the money is flowing and times are good, but it’s how an organization responds and acts when the going gets tough when the true colours come out. One review mentions people having an axe to grind: I’m not sure that they do (and I certainly don’t). During the “good times” there are a lot of perks that divert attention from the negatives and make it easy to overlook them. Take those perks away and suddenly the only thing you have to focus on are the negatives. That is largely what I think is coming out in the reviews now. The rose tinted glasses are off and it is important that people know what to expect if they decide to pursue a career with GSMA at the current time. My main gripe was with leadership: they were generally inaccessible to anyone outside of their immediate reports. Those in their inner circle were mysteriously promoted to positions that did not previously exist and were not advertised internally or externally. For an association, the leadership team is very highly paid and a there are a number of ELT members whose day-to-day function remains a mystery. When MWC was cancelled, they opted to protect their own salaries, justifying that the leadership and extended leadership team needed to remain motivated whilst over a third of the workforce were made redundant. Although the large sponsors pulling out had significant influence on the decision, GSMA was ahead of the curve when they cancelled MWC20 due to COVID. The eyes of the whole event industry across the world were on GSMA: in my opinion it was a real opportunity to lead and innovate and set the tone for future events. Instead, they spent their time scrambling for a solution that would rescue the beloved golden goose, choosing to revert back to a model that worked in 2005/2006, and completely missing the opportunity presented to them to rethink the entire event model and offering. Leadership dropped the company values into every possible communication. In principle they are great values and there was a lot of excitement about them when they were introduced a few years ago, but leadership don’t live them and you have to lead by example for people to really buy into things like that. They simulate an open culture by hosting staff calls where staff can question leadership but leadership don’t like the hard questions. I personally lost all respect for Mats when his response to a question on leadership behaviour was that the company values were written on the wall and if anyone didn’t like them, they could leave. How many people are going to take advantage of this “open” culture when those brave enough to ask the tough questions receive responses like that? Leadership would hold meetings with staff to discuss results from the staff survey and then spend the majority of the time making excuses for why ratings were low e.g. “maybe you were feeling down because it was after Barcelona and the post event euphoria had worn off so you ranked this lower”, instead of having open and honest conversations about what caused low ratings and what they could do about it. They are tone deaf too: during the COVID cull staff raised concerns about having little to do and were told to “go play golf or do some knitting”. In the run up to the cancellation of MWC20, staff found out everything, - even that the event had been cancelled - from the press. Leadership blamed it on a breach of embargo by press but embargo or no embargo, the minute the press release was being drafted; the staff should’ve been informed so they didn’t find out from a third party. The fact that the press were the company’s first port of call demonstrates to me where leadership rank their staff in the grand scheme of things and shows a huge lack of respect (a key company value) for the entire workforce.
