- Poor work-life balance: Many working hours. Unrealistic deadlines and last minute internal changes force employees to work late at night and weekends.
- Poor job evaluation: Senior management lacks evaluation/appraisal skills and is not willing to understand the value of a proper evaluation structure. Their feedback is unproductive and more or less like "OK, your deliverables are good... but they still need improvement". There are neither specific comments on deliverables nor recommendations for improvement. Moreover, among evaluators are Heads of other teams that have few to no actual info about their employees' working progress. Employees feel that the main goal of their evaluation is to make them feel useless and work more with the same salary.
- Senior management does not work as a team with their employees: They want employees that simply execute orders rather mindful full of ideas and proposals people. The irony is that when their ideas finally do not work, they blame subordinates for their mistakes in order to protect their authority to the rest of the managers.
- The goals and deadlines they set are mainly unrealistic: Senior management is not able to estimate a realistic time plan for their team members. As a result, there is a lot of stress and many workings hours. The worst part is that when the deadline is close and the goal cannot be met, they intimidate and blame their team for working poorly.
- The internal team feedback is on foot, frivolous and abstract. As a result, there were many internal iterations of a specific deliverable. The feedback is intimidating and not in person (in front of other team members or other teams).
- There are no written processes, clear position roles and structure
- The collaborative spirit is: "Those who shout loudest are the ones who survive"
- It's a family business. Which leads to a lot of internal conflict between each other. Often there shouting and cursing between them.
- It's an open space working environment which leads to a lot of noise. Difficulty to concentrate, or to make a call with a client.