Working hard? Know your stuff? Have a promotion! We will consider your salary when your next 6 month review comes around. Honestly.. We mean it.
In fact I personally moved up the ladder 3 times in short order at Zen, and never once received an associated pay rise. In my final position we were continually knocked back by HR on the pay issue, with them stating that the scale was on a par with industry standards. Unfortunately they had no idea what our actual job involved, and had gone purely off the job title when working this out. If however you're applying for a role that has the word "Manager" in the title, you can expect to be well paid for doing nothing of any use to anyone.
In nearly a decade of working there, everything that made it great crumbled around me. The entire operation is now barely held together by a massively underappreciated and often grossly underpaid technical department, while middle management continually find reasons to hire in yet more middle management. They are effectively working as a team to ensure that they spread what little real work they do between as many people as possible.
Bureaucracy is rife, the middle management circlejerk has done an excellent job of making it as hard as possible for staff to do anything productive without endless meetings and paperwork. Project meetings frequently consist entirely of people why have no idea why they are even in a meeting. When a manager really want something to happen though, you will be told to just do it regardless of policy / change control / the laws of physics / common sense. Senior management only listen to middle management, and middle management do not listen to their staff.
Many of the perks have gone, you can still get a free cuppa but that's about it.
Product management consists almost entirely of people who know nothing about the product they're apparently supposed to manage. Heaven forbid that you might find a document rigidly defining what a product includes or how it should be set up.
The catering on site is atrocious. It wasn't so bad when they moved into the current building, but they quickly got rid of the incumbent catering company and hired in Baxter Storey. Suddenly, instead of large quantities of good simple food at a reasonable price, we're offered fairly sub-standard food in bitesize quantities, labeled with a name intended to make it sound more fancy than it is, at prices that really don't seem to reflect the fact that it is subsidized by the company. Receipt of the weekly lunch menu was often the highlight of a Monday morning, much fun could be derived from trying to work out what the hell the latest ridiculous menu item actually was. These people really are on an entirely different plane of reality.
When management perceive a problem with the general performance of a department, or in some cases seemingly when they're just bored, they restructure. Cue lots of moving teams around, splitting and joining of teams, moving people to new desks, etc etc. Everyone ends up doing the same job but with a whole new set of issues to get in their way.
As much as Richard Tang always seemed like a nice enough guy, and indeed in the few times I directly interacted with him it seemed like he was a man with some common sense and intelligence, I feel as though towards the end of my time there he was losing touch with the majority of his employees though. I'm sure it's difficult to maintain as a company grows, but with senior management filtering everything that reaches him now, I doubt he has the slightest idea that many of his most valuable staff are utterly fed up.
Last but not least, it's in Rochdale. I've never been back there since I left Zen, it's rubbish.
