Better benefits but culture and location need improvement - Administrative Officer The ISF Academy Employee Review

Great working environment with friendly colleagues

Work can sometimes become mundane and repetitive

More paid leaves when compared to other companies

The working culture and environment is incredibly toxic and micromanagement prevails. 1️⃣Working overtime as benchmark of loyalty and competence Staff are expected to work overtime as a proof of being hardworking and responsible even if the work is not urgent and can be done before deadline. Some managers “work” overtime to scroll their phone without any productive output. Working overtime literally means not leaving the school “on time” and not taking the shuttle bus to leave the school. 2️⃣Management Having Double Standards If you can capture the heart of the management, congratulations! Just stay until you retire! The management will guard you whatever happens as long as they like you. Promotion is by favourtism within the department. If you fail to get on the management’s good side, please leave as soon as possible. Even if you do your work well, they can still pick on your work cuz they are the “rule-maker” in the department. Never can you satisfy them if they dislike you at the very first place. 3️⃣ Lack of transparency and poor internal communication In their job ads, it stated that they are looking for a candidate embracing change. Indeed, they tried to have different “innovative” changes that add burden to colleagues’ workload. Whenever they want to initiate a change, they only discuss among the high-level management. Never do they involve the opinions of the affected parties like the one who executes the ideas. Even if the change in policy affects external parties, they will address it till the last minutes, prompting others so hard to be on the same page. When you try to propose any changes, they try to act like being open to new ideas and encourage any input. Your ideas will then be buried haha. 4️⃣Imbalance of workload among staff Greater capability comes with more workload. Recognition of hard work and increase of workload never reflects in the salary increment anyway. Some members from the management level have little workload. But in the office, being under micromanaged, they just can’t do their own things. They will just work on 1 slide of PowerPoint for the whole day while getting an unexceptionally high salary every month. The organisational structure within the department is totally non-sense, having a crazily high proportion of review level comparing with the execution level. The lower-rank staff are just overwhelmed with the demanding workload without any say. 5️⃣ Suffocating micromanagement Colleagues are not allowed to chat in the office as the management level just wants people to work silently. Making noise will make you receive criticism. Some managers will monitor the time you clock out for lunch and check with if you are sticking with the 1-hour lunch break. To make things worse, they will even monitor how frequent your toilet break is and constantly check whether you are in your seat working and what you are working on.