WSP is driven by their profit margin. Staff and well-being play a distant second to making a profit. Staff wellbeing is regularly sacrificed to meet deadlines, and appease unreasonable and bullying clients. Managers are unable to protect their direct reports from this, as they are also facing demands to meet arbitrary and unreasonable productivity metrics and profits.
Senior leaders and management are ignorant, insensitive, and unsuited for their positions. The head of UK operations ordered everyone back into the office three days a week with no warning, no exceptions, and via email. After severe staff backlash, leaders realised they could never enforce it without many staff, so they gave up. Leaders are not good at leading people, lack appropriate experience in their sectors and play favourites when deciding who to promote.
Staff are overworked and underpaid, It is well known in the sector that WSP pay their staff the lowest of nearly any engineering consultancy. At no point in the two years I was there were all the positions in the team filled, as they struggled to recruit. Staff regularly work well beyond their pay band, but are rarely recognised or promoted to match the work they are producing. They were unable to create a reasonable workload, as we swung wildly between being unable to complete everything asked of us and begging for work due to having nothing to do.
Presenteeism is encouraged. I regularly spent whole days in the office on Teams calls but was questioned if I didn't come into the office at least once a week. My team was split across the UK, but I never met some of them because there was never time or money to do a team day. And don't believe any promises about having money for training - I asked for two years and didn't see a penny.
Please be incredibly careful considering working for WSP if you're neurodivergent - I experienced severe burnout, escalated anxiety, poor health, and depressive episodes because my needs were never met.
There is both too much bureaucracy and too little. Timesheets, year goals, and other forms take up a lot of time, but the actually useful forms, such as stress risk assessments, are rarely filled in or even known about. So the people who would benefit from them are never able to.
Any efforts towards inclusion and diversity are token gestures at best - it took me nearly 6 months to get approval to run a lunchtime session on neurodiversity for about 30 people, because senior leaders were afraid it would effect productivity and no one wanted to take responsibility. One International Women's Day talk included a woman who put her success down to begin able to afford an au pair to look after the children, which, of course, is outside of most people's budget.
The idea that WSP is an environmentally considerate or responsible organisation is, quite frankly, ludicrous. I was unfortunately part of a team working on a scheme that would see a road built through irreplaceable habitat. The impact of the road could never be mitigated, as the habitat is so fragile. And yet, despite WSP claiming to protect biodiversity and the like, at no point questioned whether this was the right project. I begged to be taken off the project and eventually succeeded. I then refused to work on any more road projects, of which there were many.
