Working at Hoare Lea broke me - Sustainability Consultant Hoare Lea Employee Review

It has taken me more than a year to get over the trauma of working at Hoare Lea to the point where I feel like I’m now able to talk about it in a reasonably neutral way. This is bearing in mind I’m someone who was in theory ‘successful’ there, leaving with glowing remarks and personal messages from many of the partners (now directors). In reading what I have to say below, please note I was in no way forced out or asked to leave - quite the opposite. Hoare Lea is one of those companies that look great on paper with slick marketing, saying all the right things, employees on LinkedIn attending, hosting, and praising events, driving the industry forward. All great on the surface. But look behind the scenes and you will find exhausted, unhappy, underpaid and often even sick people, eternally overworked and undervalued. For full disclosure and fairness, I have heard anecdotal evidence that this (at least the pay and promotion side) has changed a bit for the better in the past year or so, with some much overdue pay reviews and promotions happening. The company is set up with each office and specialist group run as its own ‘cost centre’ which means rivalry and cost cutting between different parts within the firm is common (not to mention stupid amounts of time spent invoicing between divisions). There are 60 or so middle aged white men at the top, there was one female partner all the time I worked there, and zero people of colour at the top tier. They say they value diversity and undergo unconscious bias training but it doesn’t seem to have resulted in changes at the top as yet. In terms of formal progression, the career paths framework used to manage the 12(!) levels of hierarchy is sufficiently vague and opaque that managers can, and do, use more or less any justification they want if they don’t want to promote you. In my case this happened a lot, and it felt mostly like a personal issue: they didn’t like me. Hence, for most of my time there I had to fight and claw for every scrap. After a while I kind of just gave up on career progression. I also wasn’t able to request a different manager for my appraisals when I was assigned a person I didn’t get on with and felt like I couldn’t talk to openly. Whenever I did get promoted / a payrise it was clear from the language used that I was meant to feel grateful (rather than justly deserving). I want to say as well that all of this was despite colleagues at all levels singing my praises, no one being able to put a finger on my work, I was well liked by colleagues, peers, clients, I cared deeply about my colleagues, the company, and doing a good job, I was (and am) actively involved in the wider industry and I worked hard for many years, often giving up my own free time for evening events etc. I was never coasting or doing a poor job. It felt like being human was not allowed, having an opinion, or a personality that didn’t match exactly with the management was a huge issue. You ideally had to be a robot to survive / do well. If someone dared put their head above the parapet and, say, challenge a partner in a meeting or tell a joke (how unserious!), or wear clothes slightly out of the corporate norm, it wasn’t uncommon for the group partner whip round and single out junior members in nasty ways in internal meetings in front of the whole group. And then there’s the workload. In my group there was a rule, instigated from above, that all team members must be resourced to 5.5days pw minimum, ensuring you were never able to do your work and / or leave on time without feeling guilty and stressed. You were meant to ‘find efficiencies’ but what it really is is overworking everyone, and not trusting your people to know what they can do in a week in a reasonable amount of time. Everything and I mean everything was profit driven. Every group meeting had profits as the first point of order, comparing the status of different teams, putting them against each other. Again, toxic and unhealthy. I get that it’s important to be profitable, but so are many other aspects of the working life in a group of 50 humans working on interesting and exciting technical projects at the cutting edge of the industry. And my last but most important point: In my last few years there we had at least 7 people (that I know of) out of a total group of approx 50, take sick days for stress, depression and anxiety. That’s 15% of the workforce within the group in the span of maybe 3 years. Some were off for months. People were calling ambulances at night, thinking they were going to die from panic attacks. People crying at their desks late at night was a fairly frequent occurrence. I was diagnosed with depression and had to take medication for over a year. Consequences for the managements overseeing this catastrophe: none. They are still working there, still being promoted, lauded, revered. I implored the HR team to look into this in my exit interview but as far as I can tell nothing has changed. There is a company system in place where you can get some therapy or other help, but from what I experienced this was more or less just used a a crutch by managers. ‘Go talk to these people and then you can come back and feel better’. No internal help was put in place, no regular follow ups with the team leader, nothing. For me it was actually used against me in an appraisal subsequently, telling me in not so many words that I wasn’t pulling my weight, rather than acknowledging the underlying issue and helping to get through it. I’m better now, due to efforts of myself and my own GP, not Hoare Lea. I would say the experience probably differs a lot between teams, offices and ‘cost centres’, and whether your manager likes you or not, but certainly where I was (specialist group spanning the UK, working from the London office) it was a sick and toxic culture and it made many people actually sick as well. In summary: Stay far, far away if you value your health and happiness.