Control Risks reviews about "colleague"

Long hours and heavy workload (although the company does not encourage to work overtime) Not very tolerant about junior team members' mistakes Promotion opportunities can be limited to very few team members; but it is understandable

Nothing endemic in organisation; line management can be an issue though

Staid management and a feeling that we are always chasing to be something else rather than what we are. Lots of change in the past couple of years which threatens the really unique culture of the company.

Sometimes the amount of work threatens to overwhelm our resources; long nights and burned weekends do happen.

Senior management is still peppered with the "old boys" of the company's dying past as the private sector version of an officer's club. Though they will fall in numbers as the years pass, the few that remain are in senior roles where they appear immovable. Their disconnect from the more dynamic, ambitious, overworked and underpaid, and less clubbable employees is frustrating at best. While the pay is slightly below market, it is tolerable. What is less tolerable is that the pay is not commensurate with the workload or the toll that the work takes since it is highly stressful. This will not likely be resolved any time soon. The final con is the sheer level of bureaucracy and administration. Even the most determined and well meaning employee, a zealot, a fanatic, would give up at the futility of achieving even the smallest amount of change. On the plus side, they know it and hopefully they will do something about it.

Quite limited career transition options if you joined the company as a fresh grad given the niche focus of the consultancy practice

Poor management and lack of career progression.

There is still too much deadwood, which creates immense pressure on diligent employees to pick up the slack, with little to no work/life balance at times. High performers tend to leave after a few years for greener pastures, while people with questionable work ethics stick around. Remuneration is poor for the industry, and there are close to no benefits / bonuses are not in line with performance.

- No investment in employee's professional development. For the Business Intelligence practice, research and writing are pretty much the only hard skills you have as a researcher. They might argue OSINT skills, but it's largely basic surface web research and is not transferrable to actual OSINT roles. - Fixation on billable man-hours, narrowly defined as any work tagged to a project. 1) The high KPI on this makes it virtually impossible for a junior employee to spend time on personal development, though there's not much resource on that, either. 2) There are non-billable hours that are still essential to winning billable projects, such as proposal writing and scoping; however, it is perplexing that the management has decided that these are not part of productive hours. As a result, sloppy proposals, underestimation of project price and tight timeline are common, and the directors would leave it to the project team to deliver anyway. - Stagnant if not declining industry, with declining pool of clients and project value. As such, the most common way companies gain advantage is to undercut price or promise faster turnover. There's a limit to how fast the project team could realistically complete a project without either sacrificing quality or work overtime every single time. Any feedback on this has fallen on deaf ears. - Fixation on revenue means little to no effort on employee welfare to retain them. Systemic issue such as described above is the source of dissatisfaction, brain drain and poor morale, and this couldn't be offset by random wellness sessions instigated by HR. - No transparency from leadership, even on the most basic things like tracking our own monthly KPIs. Salary discussion is actively discouraged. No, it is a good practice to minimise information asymmetry and ensure fair pay and to prohibit that just worsens your reputation. - Compensate your employees accordingly. So many are offered bottom of the pay range despite their track record showing otherwise. Company is only willing to bump up compensation when they're threatening to leave. This shows you have the budget all along, but aren't willing to reward them if they had stayed. Why is that? Also, bonus is really low. - No clear career progression, which has been largely based on tenure. I'm beating the dead horse here, but I still think it's necessary to say that having mostly Caucasian leadership regardless of the office location (even Asia) despite having locals as the majority of mid- to junior-level employees indicates a lack of willingness to localise the practice at the very least. As I have said, there are so many highly, and even over-, qualified people at the lower levels.