Great staff and products, horrible management and culture
Pros
Current office location is okay, if a little cramped and smelly outside. It’s not that badly served by public transport either, at least for where I live. Product that I work on is cutting edge (or at least used to be before we joined ION). Medium-sized nature of most clients means that your client-side contacts are very often people who are on a learning curve, who therefore trust and feel like they can rely on your knowledge and advice. My colleagues (some pre-acquisition but especially many of the newer and younger faces since) are some of the nicest people that I have ever worked with and I am happy to count many of them as my friends. I am (for the most part) allowed to get on with the things that I do best, in particular coaching clients and less experienced colleagues in the things that I know. People in other functions and other group companies are generally cooperative and don’t make unreasonable demands of your time, not least because they are as overworked and understaffed as the rest of us are. Almost all of my colleagues and clients respect me and the work that I do.
Cons
Senior and middle management seem to hate and fear the staff and don’t have the same respect for their experience and expertise that clients and colleagues have. Certain new management hires are in the habit of throwing their weight around on matters that they don’t understand and that lie well outside of the scope of their authority, causing chaos for those of us who have to clean up their mess afterwards and needlessly putting less confident and less experienced staff in fear of their jobs in the process. The same new management hires often amplify the unrealistic expectations of clients whose decision-makers are equally clueless about the range of options actually available to them, in place of helping more knowledgeable people to manage and guide those expectations in a more constructive direction. Blame game culture is rampant. Most of us doing the actual work trust and respect each other, but very few of us trust and respect the people three or more levels above us because it is clear that they don’t trust or respect us. Opportunities to move around between specialisms are practically non-existent, even when the moves in question would be seen as being pretty obvious anywhere else on account of the obvious synergies with existing areas of knowledge. It is almost impossible to hire people, unless it’s new grads. So the workload keeps increasing, people keep leaving, no-one new ever joins and the workload keeps increasing again. Maybe they think they can just replace us all with AI in a couple of years from now. The recent return-to-office mandate is blatantly a mechanism for forcing people to leave without having to pay them redundancy or settle the unfair or constructive dismissal claims that would inevitably arise if they tried to push them out by any other means. There is next to no investment in the products that ION have acquired, and product documentation in pretty amateurish. Pay is well below what you could be earning elsewhere for doing pretty much the same job. Investment in people is equally scanty. You’re far better off paying for your own training and then looking for a job elsewhere. ION won’t know how to make use of it anyway.
