MVF

3.0

19 Aug 2021

Recommend

CEO approval

Business outlook

Pros

Starting at MVF feels very much like a continuation of uni. The company has a very young workforce and you’ll find plenty of people that are up for the pub on any day of the week. You’ll form relationships with people that will last well beyond your time at MVF. You get exposure to every team within the business and are given actual responsibility faster than in most entry-level jobs. After a couple of years, you will have a broad set of experiences and be a good all-around strategist. This experience will look good on a CV and will allow you to perform well in interviews. You will work with some incredibly driven and intelligent people. It may be intimidating to reach out to these people when you first start but I couldn't encourage it enough. Unfortunately, many of these people will move on to bigger and better things than MVF, so learn as much from them as you can. There are lots of problems to solve - it can be very enjoyable learning how to solve all of them. You are allowed and encouraged, to think outside the box and push yourself to find new ways of tackling problems. My managers throughout my time at MVF have been great. All have understood that I don’t need to be pushed to get things done and don’t need micro-managing. You can work 9-5 if you want to (although it is unlikely that you will be able to stand out as a top-performer whilst doing so). “Summer Hours” (working an extra hour Monday-Thursday in exchange for Friday afternoon off) is a great policy … this option should be extended throughout the year. When the business is growing and hitting targets, there is a genuine buzz around the place that is really enjoyable.

Cons

If you are a high-performer you will NOT be compensated proportionately to the value that you add. I have come to resent MVF for not rewarding my work fairly. For a long time, I enjoyed my job enormously despite working at least 3 hours beyond my contracted hours every day, but it's incredibly demotivating to get so much less back than you put in. You will not be paid as much as you could working in similar roles elsewhere. The 'salary benchmarking' for the Strategy roles at MVF fell woefully short of almost every other similar role that you will find on Linkedin. Presenting significantly better job offers is seemingly the only way to get a fairer compensation offer from MVF… too little too late. Eventually, you’ll realise that the social perks of MVF don’t make up for the poor compensation/benefits which is why everyone views MVF as a grad farm. The Ops/Strategy team has the widest understanding of the whole business. Unfortunately, this means that many other teams neglect to do half of their jobs and instead rely on you to pick up the pieces. There are some people in the sales team that I imagine would struggle to get dressed without Ops lending a hand. There has been a severe lack of investment in tech. There is an enormous backlog of projects that we should be working on as well as some bespoke platforms that we built 5+ years ago that are unfit for purpose. This will hold back anyone with innovative ideas about how to drive the business forwards. Milestones and other cross-functional projects can be; extremely time-consuming, unrewarding, and often result in superfluous output (we do not need another Looker dashboard that will be used by 2 people). In the majority of cases running a good project becomes an assessment of how nice you can make a Gantt chart look and how many meaningless “actions'' you can come up with. You’ll also come up against tech resource constraints on any project that is worth running. Running a milestone is a painful experience and one which has drained all of my enthusiasm for the job. Unfortunately, it has also been decided that to get promoted it is a necessity. You will be left baffled by the lack of clarity around the salary review and promotion processes at every possible opportunity. Employees are treated like children that can’t be trusted with information that pertains to their own careers/LIVES. From my experience, information is withheld because it is hard to justify a lot of the decisions being made. With such a young workforce you end up with lots of managers in their mid 20's who should not be put in control of other people's careers. There are some people in the management team that look at management as a way to promote and advance their own careers, they lack empathy and many of the other skills needed to nurture more junior people. Some of the stories that Execs discuss amongst themselves are very troubling, but nobody in senior positions seems to be aware of them because there is no platform for giving anonymous feedback. Unfortunately when you join the Ops team you are flipping a coin as to whether you get one of the brilliant managers or someone that will ruin your time at MVF. Lead generation is uninteresting. You will quickly come to realise that we are not doing anything innovative. We are running bang-average marketing campaigns that plug a gap left by our clients' inadequate internal marketing teams. Some awful people within the business have somehow managed to wrap the senior leadership around their fingers. They are idolised despite being self-serving, rude, and contributing little value. A lot of people in senior leadership positions are very obviously out of their depth and lack the ability to actually drive the business forward. Most of these people joined the company early on and have only ever worked for MVF. They are preventing much better people from being promoted into their positions and simultaneously passing on their bad habits to anyone that joins the team. You will be constantly told that the current month is the most important in the history of the company and be urged to work tirelessly to hit targets, but there will be no reward for doing so… and then as soon as the next month begins everything that you’ve done before will be forgotten as you enter what is the new most important month in history. Everyone sees through it and has given up caring about your lofty targets. The January Bingo thing was a fun gimmick, but, in a business that is so targets-driven and has low base salaries, you need to reward people better when the business is actually doing well! So much time is spent trying to align and standardise processes across different teams in the business. Different teams work in different ways and are perfectly able to function whilst doing so. There is no need to try to standardize absolutely everything - a few people’s roles seem to hinge on them standardising things for the sake of it. You will have to perform at the expected level of the role you want to be promoted into for at least 6+ months before you will be promoted into that role. It is frustrating, feeling like you have to constantly over-performing against your role and peers to get financial recognition. The Ops academy and probation period are unnecessarily stressful. The threat of not passing probation looms large over new starters throughout their first 4 months when in reality we are hiring grads at £27k who are all more than capable of doing the job. If we were an investment bank hiring grads and paying them £50k+ then the stress to perform from day 1 seems a little more justified. The probation period exists so that the company can easily offload people that after 4 months we think we misjudged during the hiring process - it shouldn’t be waved around as a threat that everything you do during your probation will be assessed to see if you meet the required standards. The pension scheme is about as poor as it can be. Prepare yourself for a retirement eating spaghetti hoops on toast.

MVF Response

Thanks for your feedback and it’s great to hear there were positives to your experience at MVF. In respect to your feedback, there is lots here so I will try to cover the main themes which are: compensation and pay relativity to the market, counter offers, pension, working hours, the role of the Marketing Operations team, Tech investment, Milestone projects, the salary review process, the promotion process, the average age and experience of managers, feedback platform, lead generation, your colleagues, senior leadership, MVF’s approach to targets, process standardisation, the Marketing Operations academy and the probation process. I appreciate this will not cover all the points you have raised so please get in touch with me on andrew.mulder@mvfglobal.com or Ange on Andrea.Pattico@mvfglobal.com to discuss your feedback if you would like to. We like to think we are an approachable bunch. On compensation and our salary ranges, as you will know MVF rolled out its salary ranges in 2019. We keep these ranges under close review to ensure they reflect competitive pay for an organisation of our size and sector. These will be reviewed using fresh benchmarking data in October 2021 ahead of this year's salary review process commencing. We are proud of our employer proposition and the fact that people do not simply stay with MVF for salary alone (nor would we want them to). We do take on board the feedback that our benefits package is in need of a review and have also said the same at previous town hall meetings as we know our demographic has changed. Our reward partner has already done some work on this project and will be gathering data once they have completed their higher priority work on refreshing the salary benchmarking ranges and delivering this year's salary review process. At the start of the global pandemic, its impact on our business and our clients, we made the decision to pause on salary review and promotions. We know that some MVFers were not happy with this decision, but we do think that it was the right thing to do. It meant that amongst other difficult decisions and actions made, we were able to ensure that the majority of MVFers continued to have a job throughout the pandemic. We were able to get up and running again with salary reviews in Jan 2021 in a time when many businesses were still failing, freezing pay or making redundancies. Our business has proven to be robust enough to endure the trading shock that Covid-19 created and still reward our people’s amazing hard work with an above inflation pay increase. As for counter offers, it is true to say that where MVF feels we have got it wrong and someone’s pay is out of line with the market, we do consider counter offers as many businesses do. This is the exception though, not the rule, and it would categorically not be considered where there was no data to support it. We also considered impact across the wider team which is why counter offers are a very last resort and we prefer to try and address progression for all MVFers whilst they are still engaged in their role. Equally if there were values concerns regarding the person leaving a counteroffer would not be made. Moving on to working hours, MVF does not operate a long hours culture. You referred to summer hours in your feedback and I am glad this is something that you found to be a benefit. We encourage MVFers to take time out of their working day to look after their own wellbeing, use one of our Zen spaces, attend a PT class, or utilise our Sanctus coaching to name a few. Re the role of the Marketing Operations team, the role of the team is to work with their counterparts in Sales, Marketing, CRO, Data and Tech to develop strategies that will deliver growth for MVF and our clients. The Ops team lead on and manage these strategies. For these strategies to be successful, the lead must recognise the vital role that all parties play in their execution, as it is only through collaboration and trust that these will prosper. We all depend on one another to deliver success for our clients and it is through this that we form such strong and rewarding working relationships. In respect of our tech team, there are 80 people within our tech function, with 35 specifically in the engineering team. This does not include two additional outsourced tech providers. We are developing our tech org all the time and expect some exciting developments in 2022! As for milestone projects I am sorry you have found project management difficult. Many of our MVFers enjoy running milestone projects and feedback often tells us it offers people a chance to expand their internal network and develop new skills outside of the day job. Next the salary review process. As you will know, in 2020 MVF launched a refreshed Talent and Salary Review process. This was a new process designed to help bring greater clarity to Managers and MVFers generally around how salary increases work. Salary review conversations are hard, particularly when discussing performance and explaining a new process all at once. To assist, a 25 page guidance doc for managers was created on how the new process works along with scripted conversations to help managers talk to their people. I am sorry you do not feel the decisions made by MVF during salary review were fully justified to you personally. The decisions made regarding pay reviews for a global business of 500 people during a global pandemic are complex and it is not possible to share all the details of every difficult decision that is made. I think it is also worthwhile stressing my earlier point that salary increases during a global pandemic is not really the done thing for most businesses and as I’m sure you will learn as you move on to pastures new, salary increases such as those previously enjoyed at MVF pre-pandemic are not the norm for most businesses. You reference the age of MVF’s managers. I appreciate everyone at MVF looks amazing so I’m sure those of our managers it applies to would be very happy to hear that you shaved off a good 5 years + off their age. The average age of managers and senior managers is 31, not mid twenties. You are right that the average age in Marketing Operations is mid twenties and if they are first time managers, they have a great cohort of experienced managers around them at MVF to learn from. We do not think age correlates to competency, though - that would be ageist and is unlawful!! Many of our people hold specialist knowledge that is not held by people with deep management experience. We think the right approach is to develop that management knowledge via our internal academies and internal curriculum like Mate to Manager and our Management Development Academy. We do not ask people to be doing a job at a level above for a period of time before they are promoted/rewarded for it. Instead what we ask for is to see consistency of strong performance at their current level, alongside evidence that they could perform well at the level above. This evidence usually presents as development and performance of leadership traits at the level above, alongside indicators of role competency. Values matter at MVF. Many of the MVFers who helped to build the business we work for today are still here because of what they do (their skills) and how they do it (their values). If one of these things is out of line, we will address it however, we don’t broadcast it publicly because everyone deserves to be treated respectfully in spite of their own behaviour Last but not least let’s talk about the Marketing Operations academy and probation. We know that probation is a stressful time for people. The academy and our probation process are closely linked to make sure we do everything possible to help develop the skills they need to succeed. Our Health and Wellbeing Partner, Health and Wellbeing Coordinator, along with our mental health first aiders are on hand to support any MVFers who are struggling. We do not wave around probation arbitrarily as a way to stress people out but will be upfront if there are concerns so that they can be acted upon. From 1 Jan 2019 to date, of 22 new starters in our Marketing Operations team only 3 have failed their probation. We aspire for this to be 0 and are always reviewing our hiring strategy when things do not work out. We appreciate you taking the time to give us such detailed feedback of your opinions. We will take on board everything you have said but also hope that our responses have shed a little light on areas that perhaps had not been so clear. All the best in your new role - we wish you every success for the future.

(Long but PLEASE read). A good first job but you’ll need to move on when you want to grow up and further your career. - Strategy & Operations Manager MVF Employee Review

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