• Management creates fake reviews to embellish company image. This is flat out denied in one of the ‘Employer Responses’ but any keen eye can spot which reviews are fake. One such example is a (5 star) review that lists a title that has not been held by a single employee for the amount of time stated, let alone even been in existence for that duration.
• Despite claims to the contrary in the ‘Employer Responses’, there are unfortunate examples of workplace bullying by leadership. In one particularly egregious example, managers and team leaders banded together on a group social messaging app to have a team member removed from the company. Allegations of bullying are often waved off and not taken seriously.
• For a company that prides itself on the diversity on its staff and students, racism (especially towards students) and sexism is frequent behind closed doors.
• A blind eye is often turned towards course entry requirements in the name of reaching sales targets. There have been multiple cases where employees were told not to ask for customers’ visa statuses so that certain visa restrictions could be ignored and enrolment could proceed.
• Non-attendance to optional social events has been brought up and looked down upon in one-to-one performance reviews.
• New policies and processes are implemented without sufficient time to properly inform and prepare staff. Even the unsuccessful and unpopular phone standards practice put in place, which makes our office space feel like a loud and disorganised call centre, has been nigh impossible to remove despite protests by the vast majority of the company.
• While the company grows and customer numbers climb, many teams are in dire need of assistance with the ever-increasing workload. Current methods to deal with this are worrying and unsustainable:
o Team members are praised for their commitment to their work and lack of a “clock-in, clock-out” mindset. These words are chosen carefully, as some of what this describes is team members staying well, well past their working hours to manage their workload. While said employees could be held partially accountable for this atrocious work/life balance, it sounds alarm bells. At best, this shows a severe lack of awareness on management’s behalf of their staff’s needs. At worst, employers are actively taking advantage of their employees.
o Rather than focus attention on hiring staff in areas it is truly needed, employees are encouraged to “lend a hand” and ultimately take on responsibilities across functional teams in which they are not sufficiently trained. This is done under the guise of “offering opportunities to broaden your horizons”. We are then praised for not operating in “functional silos” while we are labelled as “not being team players” for sticking to the job outlined in our position descriptions.
• Many concerns, complaints and suggestions for improvement have been raised by staff in the past and while managers appear to be actively listening and promise to escalate issues, much of this seems to fall upon deaf ears. When annual engagement surveys are held, positive responses are emphasised and where negative responses are acknowledged the strategy seems to be to make empty promises. It is no wonder that staff have started to feel discouraged and unwilling to voice some of their thoughts and opinions.
• Finally, and more generally, as a result of these reasons and others there has been a palpable decrease in morale in recent years, making the working environment a very uncomfortable one and not one I would easily recommend to anyone wanting to sign on.
