Good money, bad culture - Associate IFM Investors Employee Review

One of the worst company cultures around - from someone who has worked at many other large and small firms in Australia and abroad. Company is large and fund structures are unnecessarily complex, meaning a lot of manual work and frequent errors. Management typically lobby for as many staff as they can get, meaning the work is not too onerous, but there are too many staff involved which leads to endless meetings and multiple approval layers for immaterial requests, this results in significant project delays which are typically highly over budget. Highly political organisation, which can mean good people are forced to treat others badly in order to protect their own careers. Place is far from a meritocracy- promotions and pay rises mainly come via being ‘friends with the boss’ rather than improving company processes. At the same time, many instances of ‘false diversity’ where people who didn’t work on a task are requested to present it to leadership, rather than those who actually did the work. Company is not serious about governance- and governance teams are typically understaffed and a lot of resistance from fund managers towards compliance/ oversight teams. The governance teams themselves have a culture of ‘letting sleeping dogs lie’ and not ‘rocking the boat’. Governance staff are directly told not to upset the teams they are overseeing. A lot of cases of bullying, with staff generally afraid to speak up.