Now the negatives. I am sure you are jumping for joy after reading the above positives. I hope the list below will not disappoint.
Please allow me to make a few observations before I begin: you will see a flurry of new ‘positive’ comments for this company within a small time frame. The company has requested their employees and senior management to review them positively – just like they did for Google review. I only can hope money changed hands! Wanstor emails around asking their staff to review them and even went around with a tick list making sure some did!
Wanstor have tried to repudiate some of the comments here as they go on a mission to justify themselves, like saying things like “hoping to review their employees anonymously” – see below comments.
The management is socking! They treat whom they like with lot of esteem and those they do not like with contempt.
The staff turnover is high – why? Well, partly because they fire people indiscriminately, like when people are sick or when they want to study part time or when they say they cannot work weekends or when questioning why they had not been paid properly for overtime.
Wanstor were recently taken to court and were found guilty on all counts for unfairly firing one of their employees ; they neither followed their own procedures or minimum ACAS rules and acted very badly and aggressively. May I encourage you to do a Google search for the tribunal. It is an eye opener, especially to see how the MD treats the employees there.
Secondly, staff are undervalued and underpaid. So people often left. They lost a lot of talent because of it. There is hardly any prospect of promotion - you are stuck at your job. Remind me of the good ol’ 60s, where you had a job ‘for life’. If they liked you, they paid you back by sending you to all kinds of places in and out of London with 5 minutes’ notice – literally! Oh you also get asked to do night shifts because they choose not to employ enough night staff to cover (until recently, they literally had one person man the whole office from 10PM till 8AM. Imagine the consequences of an accident!)
Thirdly, they are good at not sorting out visas for those who are on working visa, so, lo’ behold, one day you are working the next day Wanstor forgot to renew your visa – despite many reminders – and then you have to pack up and leave the country you have been working in for years! You get the picture.
The HR is shocking! If you want a HR who knows their HR ‘stuff’, don’t put your hope in this HR. They have no clue! This is including HR procedures, how to book holidays, how not to book someone else’s holiday against you, how to speak to someone who is unwell… oh don’t even ask them legal questions either. They don’t know anything in terms of HR laws and regulations. I do give them credit to knowing how never take on board what people say on their exit interviews.
They have a rule that it is a sack-able offence if you talk about one’s wages! You read that right! Because they pay people so badly, they want you to know it a sack-able offence if you share with your friends what you might be earning with your hard working hours you put in. This not only creates division but suspicions. They have artificially created a culture of distrust within the staff.
If you have a family, may I encourage you not to consider this place. Unless you do not want to see them or have no semblance of work-life balance or consistency in seeing them. And then hope your kids or partner never gets ill! If you were to call in sick/or with sick dependants, HR will make you – that’s right, you- feel guilty! They will want you to call in at 9AM. Most of the time HR was not in at 9AM. Some who worked on shifts or at client’s started at 8:30/8:00, so if you were sick, they had no structure in place to call in till 9AM, but you were a ‘no-show’ at the client’s – as it was the HR’s responsibility to call them. Number of times, if you were at a client’s office, they did not send an engineer to replace you for the day, and guess who was made to feel guilty they were not able to, due to the lack of time to organise this?!
I hear you ask, how does one get a pay raise? Well, does the management like you – yes? Then they give it to you, not inflation busting of course (so really you are earning less this year than last year due to inflation and cost going up). No? Good luck, try again next year. The pot is: we like employee A, B and C – so they get a pay raise. We do not like X, Y and Z – nein mein feuer! I can assuredly tell you this because they send you a letter well before your annual pay review that you had a raise or no. So, the review is pointless as there is no incentive or even opportunity to talk about it. If you bring up pay at your review, you will be told they can’t talk about it and that they will need to speak to MD directly about it. Lo and behold, guess who has to like you? Yep, you guessed it!
The annual review was a waste of time. The meetings were rushed and totally haphazard. You go through a check list that was never reviewed again, including any targets that were set. So the targets were pointless. Even if you said for example that you want to do exams, no time was given for study, or if you said, you want to learn so and so, again no time was given. So what was the point of targets? Then the paperwork was signed and folder was closed and next year a new page was opened ad infinitum. May I be as bold as to encourage the management and HR to look up the SMART model for performance objectives? (Specific; Measurable; Achievable; Realistic and Timed).
There was no perks at all. You literally got paid and that’s all for the company. Though to be fair, now and then on a Friday there was a BBQ and sugary treats. However, nothing structured or long term – such as medical insurance; extra holidays (than the 20 they give); buying computer hardware on a tax free scheme… I appreciate they are not bound to, and after all it is that – an incentive, but it is not only an investment on the staff, but a way to show appreciation. There are Christmas parties, but note that recently we went to one, where our Yorkshire puddings were cut up in half – so you only got half. Budgetary reason dare I say!
You were forced to log time of 450 minutes per day against tickets. You had to reach your quota of 450 minutes a day! That is 7.5hrs multiplied 60 minutes. That means they demand that every minute of your day, bar the hour lunch has to be accounted for against your tickets you are working on. No time was to be taken for a break, coffee, bathroom, talking to colleagues, meetings, research with your team, meeting HR, sorting out HR’s mistakes, advising HR’s mess up on your calendar…. Every minute had to be accounted for. Is this achievable? No. Is this however demanded? Yes! This leads to people over logging time (no fault of the staff but due to pressure from above)– perhaps even be tempted to over exaggerate their work. However, the management are happy and overlook that staff are not being totally honest, like taking 1 hour to reset a password in AD, as long as they can bill the company in question. Does it really take 6 minutes to pick an email from the mailbox and click ‘attach’ so the email binds to the ticket? Money ! Money! Money!
Oh, did you want training? Is that a reason for looking at this company. Blood, stone… you know the old adage. Not happening.
Sure, no company is perfect. We all know that. No person is perfect too. Having working there for a number of years, having spoken to a number of employees and ex-employees, rest assured, this is a common feeling. If you have any question, please ask. Would love to talk about it. Again, do not forget that google search of the tribunal!
***The previous version of this post had over 10 ‘helpful’ likes by staff! Get this heard people! ***
