A workplace of contradictions.
Please note that this comment is related to the London office only.
- the targets are the same for everybody, however each language agent has a different workload, therefore if you are on a busy language line you may spend 8h non-stop on the phone, struggling to keep up, while your desk-mate on a different line is listening to music or watching youtube videos for hours, with no one noticing. Ah, and of course the pay is the same: highly motivating.
-you might be VERY good at your job, but no one will actually care or notice it. This because they judge your performance based on your numbers. This is partly understandable (being such a big company), however the job itself gets completely forgotten. You might save a customer's holiday or maybe just avoid that a customer sleeps on the streets by doing everything in your power, but still no one will ever know. But if you're late even 1 minute from your break/lunch or your numbers are not in target well.. you will have a few words with your manager about it.
-also, by being very good at your job you won’t have time to participate to the office’s activities and promote yourself, as apparently this is the only way to get promoted. So the results is that people who don’t perform well but manage to get involved will step in and become your manager. How great is that.
-they claim they are a multicultural company, however the senior management is 99% British and not really understanding of the different cultures in the office.
-you might get really lucky by promoting yourself and pretending to be someone that you aren’t and be included in a program to become Team Leader (possibly within more than 1 year and multiple projects to be completed in your own time). During this period they will still hire Team Leaders from outside the company (who most likely will be fired after a few months for gross misconduct), while potentially great employees who have been in the company for years (who are never late, never sick, very knowledgeable and already with management background/skills) remain in the shadow, glued at their desks.
-your job might be 99% related to your language, however your Team leader (who most likely doesn’t know your language) will evaluate the quality of your job based on the remaining 1%, as it’s the only part they can physically understand.
-the sickness/lateness policy simply is a joke: you might face disciplinary actions/bonus reductions if you are sick 3 times within 1 year (even if single days), and the absurdity of this is that the office itself is the main reason you might get sick, due to the air conditioning continuously blowing glacial air no matter the weather outside or the season. But no one will do anything about it, ever. Even if you complain.
-the team leaders are not team leaders, in a sense that they don’t manage the teams. They walk around the office with no actual purpose, jumping from one meeting to another and when you actually need them to do something for you, it might take weeks for them to complete a single task that could actually be done in minutes. If any customer service agent had the luxury to apply the same approach towards their job, well... the office would collapse in one day.
