-Office/Culture: The UK office is the most depressing office I’ve ever worked in. The offices are tucked away in Aldgate, away from the buzz of the city. The office itself is so small and there are frequently times when there aren’t enough desks to go around.
The atmosphere/culture in the office is non-existent. The events that are planned are things kids in primary school would enjoy - e.g. trampolining and making ice cream sundaes - not things professional people want to do with their evenings in London. The summer social basically catered to people with children only - bouncy castles and carnival games, anyone? It was also on a Saturday, and having to attend a work event on a Saturday is the last thing I want to.
-People Managers: The People Manager program is terrible. You are assigned a people manager (likely in the US) who is supposed to help guide you in your career at Acumen. You will likely never meet this person face to face (for UK employees), but they are the ones in charge of your promotion within the company.
In the UK you are also assigned a “buddy” in your first week, this is someone you can ask questions to. You then also get a mentor in the UK - this is someone you can ask questions to and who can give you advice. But even though you are creating relationships with these people in the UK, none of them are your actual manager. The whole situation is in need of a revamp (even though they apparently changed it right before I joined), especially if they want to keep people for longer than 1 year.
-Lack of local knowledge from the US - The lack of local knowledge about what it’s like to live and work in the UK is non-existent from the UK HR Rep. When I originally spoke to the HR rep for the UK before I even joined I was asking if Acumen offered a Season Ticket Loan scheme which is very commonly offered by companies in London. She told me word for word “well… you choose where you live” and effectively if it’s expensive to travel in, that’s my choice. So the lack of local knowledge by the HR Business Partner is pathetic.
The lack of local knowledge is also apparent when organising things like the summer party - it’s not as if everyone lives in London and wants to travel down with their entire family (which is very expensive/time consuming depending on where you live) on a Saturday. Saturday’s are meant to be our time with our family/friends/anything other than work.
-Expense Process: The expenses process for UK employees is pathetic. Acumen use Salesforce for their expenses, so as you can imagine it is not very suited to international currencies and exchange rates. My first payout I was paid £130 less than what I should have been because they were calculating on out of date exchange rates, they then asked me to wait for the next expenses payout, which is once a month (US get their expenses twice a month), to be paid what they owed me.
This is just one of the obvious reasons Acumen couldn’t care less about its international employees. I suggested in my 60 day feedback that they change to a more international friendly system like Concur but so far not seen anything to change the expense process.
-Recruiting Process: There is one recruiter in particular, I won’t name names, who I felt very pressured by to sign my offer letter, even before the date the offer expired. I was interviewed at a client’s office (not Acumen offices) and I had to ask to see the Acumen offices once I’d signed my offer letter. I probably should have rejected the offer after I saw the offices and compared to where I was coming from.
The company really tries to play up their GSP status with Salesforce but if you walked into their offices you would think they were a mediocre start up that hadn’t yet won any business. The UK office exists solely so that the US guys get GSP status (they must have 1 international office to get that status).
-Holiday: Holiday isn’t great, not on par with majority of UK companies which start at 25 days holiday. Some people I know have had issues with taking pre-approved holiday during a project (which they were not on when they scheduled the holiday).
-Caliber of Clients: The caliber of their clients is very low in the UK. If you’ve come from working with companies on the Forbes 100/500 list, you won’t be working with them at Acumen UK. Although the office is in London, the majority of projects are not, so you will likely be required to travel up to 50% of the time. Travel time is not billable so get ready to spend a lot of personal time on trains/in your car.
Acumen have no presence in Europe so you will likely never travel outside the UK.
-No Internal IT in the UK: The IT guys in the US are great but it’s frustrating when they don’t come online until halfway through our day in the UK. If we have any issues they can’t get them sorted until halfway through the day. There was a day when I got on site to my client site and my laptop had an issue which made me unable to work for over half the day. I’ve since had my laptop reimaged twice by the contracted IT team here in the UK. All the time I have wasted setting up new laptops is just ridiculous. They also re-use old laptops, which I’m not against, but not when you are giving out laptops with 4GB RAM. I had to go to the head of IT to ask for a proper laptop with at least 8GB RAM. I mean, c’mon people we are technology company!! We shouldn’t be giving outdated tech to a consultant who is on a client site regularly. My first laptop would regularly freeze during GTMs with my client. It was really embarrassing.
-Marketing & Internal Communications: The external marketing is non-existent from what I can tell. I wasn’t involved in the marketing at all in my previous company, but everyone was always made aware of events that were taking place or things that were going on, whether internally or externally.
The US office drives everything for Acumen, so the UK is basically a forgotten stepchild when it comes to events or anything at all really. The presence at Salesforce WT London this year was really sad, especially for a Salesforce GSP.
The internal communication is mainly done via chatter, from what I can tell. It’s very patronising and cheesy usually - One month they “challenged” everyone to drink their required amount of water each day. Americans love to make everything into a competition but that’s just not how to engage people in the UK.
Overall I really tried to give Acumen a chance, but if you have the option to join anywhere else vs here, do it. If you want to join up for the high salary and then use that as leverage elsewhere, do that too. It's just business at the end of the day and people have to do what's best for them.
