Pros
Experienced fantastic personal/professional development thanks to previous managers. Lovely open plan modern office. Excellent diversity and equality schemes. Coffee from the 6th story is nice and well priced.
Cons
Flexible working is made out to be encouraged and practiced across all levels but in reality only applies to management level staff, or those whom it suits. You would be questioned and made to feel uncomfortable for asking to take a day from home for a one off doctors appointment weeks in advance. On the other hand across management it was common to have a working from home day, there is a flexible policy I agree... if you are management. Hachette offered me no flexibility towards the end of my service. Relevant training was promised during my time within the team, these promises were never delivered and I was always left disappointed. The one course I was placed on without prior knowledge until booked was advanced level and provided almost no benefit for me. I chased training for the first nine months of last year, however it was then made clear to me that I would not receive this and that I was advised to self study. This is no problem but I received no financial support and this made my training objective impossible to achieve, I was not in a position to put cash into this and this was raised multiple times to management but fell on deaf ears. I must reiterate the fact that this was after nine full months of promises, the hardest part of this was seeing other team members go on training courses paid for by the company. I could see at this point that Hachette offered me no further development. As far as workload goes there were obvious favourites in the team, who received the bulk of the work. Technical decisions were often made without any input of a technical resource, this lead to a ‘just get it working approach’ which was seen constantly but was never considered as something that could be done better. When considering replacements or new systems, it was clear management held their own agenda on what they wanted and would force it upon the team without consultant of the technical architect. These projects eventually went nowhere due to decision makers being left out until the last minute by management. This led to half finished tasks being dumped onto other members of the team, forcing panic with an unachievable deadline promised to stakeholders. Throughout my last six months at Hachette it was very clear that bad management techniques were really starting to impact the morale of the team. Examples include management mentioning on more than one occasion in personal and team meetings that they can do our jobs but aren’t paid to and changing important policies without notifying staff. All of this mixed in with poor communication and no 121s had spiralled morale well out of control.