I spent a year working at Vodafone and it was the longest, most stressful and demoralising 12 months of my career.
I was sold:
World class culture
Amazing technology
Personal Investment and development
Supportive, dynamic, collaborate colleagues
Fantastic professional opportunities
Autonomy and the ability to affect change
What I got:
A toxic blame culture where individuals from director level down spend the majority of their time courting senior execs and managers, deflecting scrutiny for some of the most shocking instances of incompetence, gross negligence and underperformance I have ever witnessed in any organisation.
Astonishing Zero Accountability - Countless occurrences of individuals and whole teams just ignoring emails, messages, tickets and requests to do their job. Tickets closed without any resolution. Tickets closed with incorrect resolutions. Tickets that regularly just “vanished”. Dozens of experiences of basic 10 minute tasks taking weeks and months to complete. When concerns were raised, people just shrugged their shoulders. I have never witnessed anything like it. Absolutely staggering.
Intolerable incompetence and mediocrity at all levels, accepted as the norm across the business. Repeated occurrences of teams and individuals, at the most fundamental level, incapable of doing their jobs, following basic step by step instructions or tasks without any recourse or consequences whatsoever; managers and senior leadership do not want to hear about it and they become vitriolic and aggressively defensive if their teams are implicated even when presented with factual evidence. Vodafone Technical Shared Services in India were an absolute embarrassment - 95% of the staff there had absolutely no idea what they were doing or were flat out incompetent.
Institutionally demoralised staff and an additional small number of incredibly toxic and divisive individuals sprinkled around the business who are far more concerned with political point scoring rather than doing what is right for the customer or the organisation.
Soul-crushing bureaucracy where you will jump through hoops for months on end to get the most basic of decisions and approvals.
Disingenuous and manipulative management who provide just enough ambiguous information to be able to u-turn a week later on anything they have committed to. Made people and departments deeply cynical and distrustful of all management in the organisation.
Zero empowerment - Think twice about trying to improve or optimise any process or way of working. Lot’s of lip-service from leadership about “driving change” but privately you’ll immediately be seen as a threat by incumbent management and you’ll be attacked and undermined relentlessly. You will hear a lot of “that’s just how things are done here”.
Absolute garbage IT systems, tools and equipment. Oracle, AmDocs, Skype, outdated office 365 and laptops that look and perform like they haven’t been upgraded since the first mobile phones were launched. Horrendous bespoke internal HR and self-serve tools written on SAP. Can take anything from weeks to months to get a simple licence for software you need to do your job. Missing or incorrect documentation for almost all tools. IT teams fundamentally don’t understand many of the systems and applications they are responsible for running. Just speechless.
Timesheets - Yes, timesheets. For perm employees. I mean seriously? It’s 2021 FFS
A communications company that is terrible at communicating. 6 different tools internally for “collaborating” so as to make it as disjointed and difficult as possible to actually work together. No one in the business uses the same combination of tools even in the same department, so you have to chase people across multiple platforms to get a response. Became a demoralising chore after 6 months.
Excruciating IT delivery problems - Want to get something delivered? Hope you enjoy 8 hour video conferences requiring 10 different IT teams distributed all over the world shouting over each other for weeks on end. Getting anything of value delivered requires a dozen teams and biblical levels of patience and endurance.
Strategic suppliers and vendors who are quite open about being on the gravy train, won’t lift a finger without getting formal statements of work signed off and what is delivered is of dubious quality. Inflated supplier SOW’s were regularly approved by managers completely unqualified to critique them.
A delusional corporate culture that now thinks it’s a tech company yet is incapable of completing the most basic of IT tasks like updating an email distribution list
Unqualified senior management in the pocket of underperforming vendors where incoherent and illogical procurement decisions are rammed through the business. Millions of pounds wasted every year. HIPPO is alive and well in Vodafone.
Whole departments whose only role appeared to be constantly delegating work to other teams and then taking the credit for it. In particular the Group function is a running joke among the local markets.
Relentless meeting culture where you’ll be lucky if you have 4 hours a week free from inane pointless time-wasting but then expected to work an extra 3 hours every day to catch up on your actual job responsibilities.
Zero work life balance or respect for people’s personal time - 95% of staff do the bare minimum, turning up at 9am and leaving at 5pm on the dot, complaining any time they are asked to assist with anything other than their BAU workload, while the other 5% work 70 hours a week to compensate, getting chased and contacted all hours of the day and night 7 days a week; regularly working weekends and holidays because of the “just get it f*cking done” delivery culture and then being admonished when you haven’t produced another miracle from yet another 11th hour senior management hospital pass. When I pushed back on this I was told that I just needed to “suck it up”. Absolutely disgusting.
Overwhelming burnout workloads and pressure - where you’ll be swamped with a tsunami of relentless demands, emails, meetings, problems and goalpost shifting, regularly work 15 hour days, provided with zero support and then micromanaged when you finally have nothing left to give.
There were situations and decisions over the course of the 12 months that were so unbelievable and outrageous I genuinely thought it was a joke.
The caveats are that:
There ARE some genuinely excellent people at Vodafone BUT they are very far and few between and I have absolutely no idea why they continue to work there considering the opportunities elsewhere these days.
Vodafone is a very large org and am certain that there are some reasonably OK teams/areas to work in but the business section I was in certainly was not one of them.
Other than a handful of people (and I could literally count these people on one hand) there were no redeeming features whatsoever for this company in my personal experience. Only stayed the year so that it wouldn’t be a blot on my CV.
Don’t be fooled by the slick brand, tv adverts and fabricated “Best Company Awards” nonsense (which Vodafone employees are harassed by managers into completing and inflating reviews for) scrape the veneer and you’ll find a disorientating and shambolic organisation that is in complete chaos, scrambling to make up ground on it’s competitors.
Relieved I managed to survive it with some self-esteem intact. Without a doubt the most toxic and demoralising organisation I have ever worked for. A truly awful experience. Avoid!
