SPH Magazines Reviews

2.9

32% would recommend to a friend

(76 total reviews)
avatar

Loh Yew Seng

52% approve of CEO

20% positive business outlook

SPH Magazines has an employee rating of 2.9 out of 5 stars, based on 76 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an average working experience there. The SPH Magazines employee rating is 22% below average for employers within the Media and communication industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

76 reviews
2.0
11 Apr 2018

Biding their time

Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Still has clout, borrowing from the height of its golden days. Hardworking units and loyal employees, but they get fewer by the month.

Cons

Run by a few self-ascribed kingpins clearly waiting for the ship to go down but who will draw pay till then. They add no edge, and their leadership style and SOPS breaks down to about 80% retrospect, hindsight, and criticism, 10% damage control, 7% mood-based, and 3% fresh ideas that actually work out. That last 3% will repeatedly, and I mean REPEATEDLY, be used to justify the harrowing other 97%. You cannot go digital with leaders who have no clue how digital circulation and even how analytics work. Bad grasp of basic mathematical concept and statistics means superiors leaping to hurried or skewed conclusions in accordance with confirmation bias. Absurd KPIs which others here have listed as "pulling numbers from the sky" - they look to be based on doubling competitor numbers without providing the direction, infrastructure, budget or manpower to achieve the goal.

3.0
13 Feb 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Good first job to ease into the industry because it's relatively fun and full of freebies and perks, such as being treated nicely at most events by PR folk.

Cons

Pretty toxic environment where superiors badmouth others openly for completely subjective reasons. It's pretty unbecoming and demoralizing to work under people you're supposed to respect, but can find no reason to. Ideas thrown out in editorial meetings are also stale and it feels like you're always playing catch up to bigger media players in the US.

1.0
29 Jan 2017

Not a good place

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

None to be honest. There is a clinic in the office building and a canteen with two stalls. Shuttle bus service

Cons

Long working hours, bad working conditions. Office is so dirty that people often fall sick. Management and hr are living in their own world. always telling unhappy employees that there is a long queue of people waiting to join this company. That may be true ten twenty years back. But now? Please wake up your idea. The company wants to move into the digital arena but is much slower than some of its competitors in the market and do not have adequate resources to do so. Bosses here don't even know how to open an email attachment, but shoot down ideas from younger employees who are actually the ones using social media. Their way of wooing the younger crowd is to spam social media and use clickbait to get clicks - if this is how a respected (at least in the past) media company wants to run the business, then I think the end is nigh. Hr is vile. In all my years of experience, I've never seen a hr team so unpopular among employees. Doesn't care about how workers are faring. Severely lacking in welfare. People are expected to juggle the workloads of two or three people because hr can't find anyone to replace the people who has left. Where is this long queue of people they speak of? Is it imaginary?

Viewing 1 - 3 of 76 Reviews

Glassdoor has 93 SPH Magazines reviews submitted anonymously by SPH Magazines employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if SPH Magazines is right for you.