Company origins trace back over 400 years and it shows - Anonymous employee London Metal Exchange Employee Review

Terrible work/life balance in the IT departments. Ostensibly it's a five day working work in actual practice it's a six-day-a-week role as you are expected to perform multiple changes most weekends, or work on large project deployments. Additionally mid-week changes are expected, but can only be started after 22:30 so you will be working late. There are no additional benefits, bonuses or even thanks given in return for working these hours. And until just before the pandemic hit in March 2020 there was no official working from home policy, so you would often be expected to be in the office the next morning after working late at night. If you are in Ops there is also the requirement to be on-call (under rota), further adding to the load. Additionally there is a real culture problem around blame; the stick rather than the carrot is the order of things. You won't be rewarded for efforts but punished for any mistakes made. There is a real feeling of everyone trying to cover their own back and shift blame, especially amongst project and mid-tier management. As a result there is a reluctance to be forward facing, to adopt newer technologies or methodologies and a generally risk-averse environment. This can lead to stagnation in an industry that is constantly changing. Internal employee satisfaction surveys reflected all the above points. They showed the various IT departments scored very low across the board on job satisfaction and company culture. Outside of the IT departments there is a sense of a company struggling to modernise. The compulsory wearing of neck ties for men, even for back office or technical roles, was only abolished around 5 years ago. Casual or dress down Friday was only brought in around 3 years ago. There was no working from home policy until 1 year ago.