Vantaggi
Free coffee/tea (if you can find a working machine)
Svantaggi
ZERO culture. Absolutely nothing to help with work/life balance. Even a mortuary has more atmosphere than this company. HR are immensely overstretched and do absolutely nothing to promote or support you. Upon redundancy, they simply said "go to the government website", rather than any assistance such as CV writing, interview skills etc. NOTHING. The company has no "team building" ethos whatsoever. You are paid to turn up, do what your manager says, and nothing else. The yearly progress reports demonstrate this too. Your job is to please your manager. The company do NOT invest in you as an employee or train you beyond the absolute bare minimum, and have little to no official training programmes. It's simply to learn from someone already doing the job. They are also ignorant to any way of improving anything, and actively state "this is how we do things here". An extremely limited and fixed mindset. Health and safety is a minefield, where they don't really listen to advice, and take every chance they can to reprimand you, including not using a pedestrian crossing for the sake of a 2 minute detour to the point where the crossing is, even though the site is self contained. Overall, unless you have a senior or management position, be warned there is absolutely NO progression, and you will never score well enough to get the best payrise. Pay is abysmal for the extremely expensive location of Cambridgeshire, and they have a very high staff turnaround, which explains the lack of proper training. They absolutely do NOT recognise talent, and do everything they can to make sure you simply do as you are told and nothing more. Suggestions are ignored, and a culture of improvement does not exist. It's as if the company is stuck in the 1970s. Only recently did they introduce a flexitime policy, which had to be reviewed as it was utterly impractical. As for benefits, there are none other than a half decent pension contribution (which makes sense as that's all the executive staff seem to care about). The company has ZERO efforts or programmes to promote diversity or inclusion, and have nothing for promotion of STEM, or balancing the male/female ratio, or doing anything to promote the business or brand as a good neighbour to the local community. They do absolutely nothing internally regarding clubs, or social events to promote a healthy relationship between colleagues, so departments become incredibly insular and "throwing the ball over the wall" is the culture. There is very little teamwork or attitude of a common goal. The company does not invest in improvements to quality of life for the employees as it does not immediately improve their profits. They are simply a company for shareholders to maximise return. They are not a company you should choose to try to develop your career, especially as management did not even know what professional accreditation was, nor why it could be important.