At Work: Top Ten Things We Love At Big Companies

Most of us have had the pleasure of working for big companies. I’ve found myself at ‘Professional Services’ companies for a long portion of my career. These firms make up 7% of the UK workforce with 2.2 million employed by them nationally, including one third of those in London.

Their industry lobby group TheCityUK says they’re Britain’s biggest exporting industry. They are part of vast global networks that share their global brand and profess the same oh-so-positive values: they’re the global financial and professional services firms.

In 2017, three of these companies made it into LinkedIn’s list of top 25 places to work. Yet for all the effort they put into selling themselves as great places to work and in winning over the cream of the millennial university graduate crop, I was at first surprised, and then I wasn’t, that they failed to achieve rankings in the Top 10.

I’ve worked in management roles for a number of these global firms for ten of the last 14 years. For me it’s completely transactional. They want a service I can provide and I want a six figure salary. I’m neither disloyal nor loyal. I’m a professional.

Some of the people I work with are my friends, others are not. It’s with a rational and unembittered attitude that I bring you the ten worst things about working in a glass office tower for an iconic global professional services brand.

Fake fun

Firms are constantly striving to create a workplace culture in which their many thousands of employees are happy to be there. This leads to frequent, tiring birthday celebrations with rich, sticky cakes in communal kitchens and sparkling wine for the desk mates of the person or persons whose birthday it is. The compulsory gifting of a helium balloon to be tied above relevant desks is a more recent phenomenon.

Lift conversations

From Monday to Wednesday morning it’s about what you did on the weekend. From Wednesday afternoon to Friday it’s about what you are going to do on the weekend. These are interspersed with note-comparing on how “flat out” you are.

Odorous lavatories

there never seem to be enough cubicles and airflow is generally poor. I once heard a cleaner in an inner London office mutter in disgust: “If da poo don’t go, you flush again.”

Performance reviews

Many say they’ve got rid of them but they remain in different guises.

Human Resources

Behind that positive veneer sits a cold-hearted machine charged with recruiting and exiting people with as little fuss and emotion as possible. Alain De Botton could have been writing in 2017, instead of in his 2009 book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, when he said: “Responsible for wrapping the iron fist of authority in its velvet glove is Jane Axtell, head of the accountancy firm’s Human Resources department, based on the sixth floor. She recently organised a landscape painting competition to help the auditors to release their untapped creativity…”

Open plan offices

They may have been meant to cut costs and break down boundaries but their effect is to distract and impede productivity while ensuring a complete lack of personal privacy.

Overly bureaucratic systems for approving and claiming expenses

It’s easier to spend your own money and take the hit for minor work expenses, which must save them millions each year.

Workplace diversity training and programs

Hypocrisy reigns as some executives perpetuate the time-honoured anti-female, anti-gay, anti-racial difference-focused behaviours and language that firms claim to be unacceptable. People often complain political correctness has gone too far.

Overuse of the word: notion, creativity:

it’s everywhere and go so well with ‘land the plane’ and ‘skate where the puck is going to be’ ..or better still ‘that’s a great question’

Arrogant partners

They’ll ignore you in the lift if there’s a status-equal for them to talk to.

by Rose Shard

 

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