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National Library Board

Engaged employer

National Library Board Reviews

3.5

64% would recommend to a friend

(168 total reviews)
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Ng Cher Pong

86% approve of CEO

30% positive business outlook

National Library Board has an employee rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 168 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The National Library Board employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Government and public administration industry (3.6 stars).

Reviews by job title

168 reviews
1.0
21 Nov 2018

Worst place to do Corp Comms ever

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Colleagues - Can telecommute - Good variety of food near workplace

Cons

- One member of the senior management enjoys denigrating staff regularly with personal attacks in the process of clearing work. These sessions can last for more than an hour and happen more than once a week. - A culture of Corp Comms first promoted which tends to lead to testy and sour relationships with other departments - Strict hierarchy and slow clearance of work even when deadlines are already tight - High turnover of staff due to the points above

3.0
15 Apr 2023

Burn After Reading

Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

1. People almost never get fired once you're emplaced. Job security. 2. Collaborative Culture 3. Folks are generally very nice and personable 4. Senior Management is relatively easy to talk to and approach 5. You get to work close to books and reading, and meet interesting external partners 6. People generally have a good impression of your company, so you usually don't feel like a dirty hatchet man 7. Books 8. NLB is genuinely a very resource-rich organization that has a lot of pro-social elements that can benefit people 9. Libraries are beautiful ideas and spaces. 10. NLB is generally a very diverse and inclusive organization

Cons

1. Deadweight colleagues in some critical chokepoints can make collaboration a swampy hellhole, especially if you're assigned bigger projects 2. Job stagnation--even if you switch roles, you might end up having to collaborate with the same problem teams or individuals--your work tends to cycle around administrative shenanigans that fit around arbitrary workplans from top-down instead of creative feedback from ground-up. Some say it's endemic to large organizations. I say people aim too low and that an organization that is centered around 'learning' can do better. 3. The marketing department has an iron-grip on a lot of public facing content and they're always understaffed, which makes the workflows an enormous pain. This stifles creativity and smother projects in the cradle. 4. Large-Scale projects often begin from badly understood/no data, and are committed to by senior members of the organization, while all the creative ideation, much of the REAL work, is left to juniors and their teams to 'make happen' 5. There is a severe 'yes-person' culture problem here, where the inclinations and preferences of bosses are prioritized over the courage to speak the truth to power and to wrangle better conditions for the teams who have to make someone else's dream happen 6. Operational Staff get shafted regularly by 'up-top' changes while being underpaid. The Public Libraries are the life and soul and raison d'etre (reason for being) for much of the organization, but they have so little autonomy over the initiatives that get thrust upon them. 7. Many teams and departments have low morale when it comes to projects, and there's a large swarth of 'let's just get it done because someone in senior management wants it done' sentiment. 8. You will likely find that your team leaders and above end up mutilating ideas or projects to conform to the expected desires or expectations of bosses instead of fighting to truly innovate. There's a lot of repackaging instead of reimagination. 9. Manpower.is.always.an.issue. 10. Bosses are not creative. 11. Did I mention that there's a lot of deadweight and 'lifers' who depend on others to do their work? 12. Learned helplessness--the belief that you can't really influence or control your environment meaningfully--is endemic

2.0
7 Sept 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

If you like books, then this is a good environment for you to work in. But then again, there are other books-related companies out there which offer way better experience, such as Books Kinokuniya. If you are lazy and know how to avoid taking on responsibility, this is a good place for you as the management will just allocate the work to other poor unassuming honest and hardworking employee. They do not really keep track of how much work they allocate to everyone and whether the workload is fair and equal. Not much OT is required, in fact almost non-existent for most employees, so there is a work-life balance I guess?

Cons

Very unequal workload, lack of control and punishment for lazy employees, management does not listen to feedback from its good employee, very little benefits and deny employees of annual bonus, virtually no career progression path, management keep changing its people and policies.

Viewing 1 - 3 of 168 Reviews

Glassdoor has 259 National Library Board reviews submitted anonymously by National Library Board employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if National Library Board is right for you.