Pros
The message of Palladium Group was really good and felt that their wider, global projects were really interesting and beneficial, such as youth programmes across Africa. Good company benefits such as health insurance, hour lunch breaks, occasionally flexible working, good holiday allowance and a good pension. Good place to start a career for people coming straight out of education as many transferrable skills gained (if you can handle the extensive cons) and altogether the actual role was not bad at all during the first few months.
Cons
The management and supervisory team at all levels were incompetent: favouritism and inappropriate relationships were commonplace, and there was a hot and cold balance of being micromanaged and patronised or avoided and ignored. The staff turnover rate was so bad that each person was doing two or three times the workload expected, and open discussions with management were met with dismissal, and when staff openly discussed with their line managers their grievances as well as admitting to job searching elsewhere, management were not concerned and had the attitude of "cant handle the fire get out of the kitchen". When a member of staff would admit to being overworked, unhappy, unwell due to the workload, or hand their notice in, they were avoided and ignored until they would eventually have to quit. Working a notice period was near impossible due to the attitudes of management, which was usually to avoid that member of staff or in some instances to discuss their performance and reasons for leaving (at one time, ridiculing this) at volume in an open plan office where staff could hear, or would prevent work from being completed by failing to action or respond to requests. To be completely frank, this role severely impacted my mental health and I saw other members of staff in the office openly crying or having panic attacks in the bathrooms, and one member of staff told a member of senior management that we had a space we went to when we needed to cry and the senior manager was not concerned by this at all. Staff were discouraged from talking to one another and the office often had a sombre mood which meant many of us had to take up smoking in order to get outside and actually have conversations with one another.