Graduates - don't bother applying - Recensione dipendente - Dipendente anonimo presso TPP

If you manage to get through the awful interview where you are constantly judged and looked down upon, this should give you a certain flavour of things to come. You are made to feel humiliated in your job role from the start. On your first day you have to go through an employee handbook, which includes the 10 commandments of TPP: 1. Always be direct– this means that you have to say ‘yes’ ‘no’ ‘I don’t know’ to questions that are asked of you. This can be useful as it creates efficiency in the workplace and prevents people giving long winded answers to simple questions. However, the process that you have to go through to program yourself to respond like this is pretty horrific and very rude. You are berated for every non-direct question you give by being told that you need to shut up by directors and are publically humiliated in front of your colleagues by being stood up in a room and labelled in a term more offensive than a ‘waffler’. For a graduate fresh in to a new job, it is a difficult and un-natural way to speak as humans aren’t machines designed to give one word answers. 2. Don’t touch the glass – all meeting room doors are made of transparent glass to highlight an ‘open atmosphere’. However, it is a cardinal sin for you to touch the glass that they are made from and you always have to touch the door handles. If you leave a finger print smear on the glass and don’t instantly wipe the glass down, this is a breach of the rules. So having a duster in your back pocket at all times is highly advisable. 3. Own up to all mistakes – this means that if you do anything wrong by breaching the 10 commandments, you have to send an email around to the whole company (around 250 employees) explaining the mistake you made and how it makes you an awful person. For example: ‘I didn’t give a direct answer when I was asked a question. This is unacceptable.’ ‘I touched the glass. This is unacceptable.’ The reason you are given for sending such emails is that it is meant to give others an opportunity to learn from your mistakes so that others don’t commit them. However, humans are always going to do things wrong and sending an email around only serves as a means of public humiliation. You feel ashamed in front of your colleagues and it is often that the more mistake emails you send, the sooner you will be sacked. Therefore you fear for your job every time such an email has to be sent. 4. Always raise your arm straight – if you are ever asked a question in a group, you must raise your arm straight up, as high as it will go. This is meant to make it easier to count a show of hands but actually is another way to indoctrinate you in to the TPP cult and embarrass you publically, should your arm not be raised high enough. 5. Communication – another rule is that emails must be used as little as possible. This is again for efficiency, but the way that TPP get around using emails can be very daunting for a new starter. You are made to stand in the middle of a room (some with 40 -50 people in it) and shout as loud as you can ‘LISTEN UP’ to command the attention of the room. You then have to wait until everyone is looking at you and then make the announcement that you need to say, such as ‘lunch is at 12:30.’ If you don’t shout loud enough, the people that are listening are encouraged to lambast you by shouting that they can’t hear you and you then have to stand there like a fool and shout your announcement again, but a little louder whilst blushing all the same. 6. Always interrupt – this means that if you need to speak to someone (even if they are in a meeting) you need to go directly up to them and tell them what you need to discuss. This is regardless of them already being in a conversation with someone else, or if they are in the middle of a task. This is again to promote efficiency. However, it is a very rude and un-natural way to operate. You are told off for apologising for an interruption and made to feel a fool for having basic common manners. 7. Always volunteer – this means that the whole company, but new people especially, have to volunteer for any and every task that someone in the company needs doing. This can include working over weekends and evenings, to answer phones for example and unsociable hours including coming in to the office at 4am. No extra money is given for this overtime and you are accosted if you don’t volunteer by being asked what plans you have that prevent you from volunteering. Plans such as lunch with friends or the cinema aren’t sufficient. Weddings and funerals are also not acceptable ‘excuses’ for not volunteering, unless it is for a close family member. 8. International travel – As part of your contract you have to be willing and able to travel internationally. This sounds very glamorous at first but is actually very demanding. You can be away from your family, friends and home for weeks at a time with very little notice of being told that you are going away. The company encourage you to drink heavily whilst you are away (especially if you are away with the CEO – you often have to stay up drinking with him in his hotel room until 6am). This leaves you very tired for your meetings the next day, especially combined with the added jet lag (which is made worse by having to fly economy class). You get very little rest breaks to actually see the country you are in because you are just constantly in and out of meetings and then drinking. It is a very unhealthy environment with no chance to exercise and have some time to yourself. 9. Security – due to the nature of the software that TPP develops, the company is very security conscious. This is understandable and admirable, however TPP take this a step too far. On an evening, nearly half the company have to parade around the downstairs meeting rooms to check that windows are shut and that no writing is left on white boards, which is very extreme. This once resulted in a new member of staff being sacked from his post as he didn’t properly check that a window was shut. 10. On call – Even though you sign up to a 37.5 hour week, the job is actually 24/7, 365 days of the year. You need to be available at all times to come in to the office or pick up work at the drop of a hat. Due to the nature of being on call, you have to live in a 10 mile radius of the office in Horsforth. This means that many new graduates have to re-locate. Due to the high turnover of staff (especially new starters), it is therefore very advisable not to sign up to a long term contract! The rules may have been started with efficiency and time saving in mind, but have actually instead turned TPP in to a cult where everyone has to follow the rules, or ‘Phoenix core values’ as they are referred to. The values are written down and read aloud in every team meeting to drill them in to staff. This constant ‘Phoenixing’ leads to people feeling very scared to do anything wrong by not shouting loud enough, not volunteering enough and heaven forbid, touching the glass. For those that aren’t intimidated by such ‘Phoenixing’ and generally have quite a malicious and ‘get ahead of the game nature’, there is a real opportunity to thrive in the company by putting people down at every opportunity by catching colleagues not following the rules to the letter. These types of people are in high level positions, constantly shouting and berating a co-workers who may have happened to not raise their arm straight enough in a meeting. Catching each other out is heavily encouraged and directors often shout at a team if say in a meeting, a member of the group didn’t instantaneously embarrass and humiliate a colleague who didn’t properly follow a Phoenix value. On the flip side of this, if they decide that they don’t like you any more, they call you a bully and sack you, even though you are merely being ‘Phoenix.’ The company basically revolves around all the above rules and at times following them can actually be counter-productive as it is very exhausting and time consuming to be on your guard at all times, making sure you act correctly and speak correctly. The CEO is also a very intimidating and overbearing individual and scares people who have been at the company for years, never mind just new starters. You are constantly being tested in his presence and as he often shouts and swears at staff that get things wrong, every meeting or interaction with him is an anxiety attack waiting to happen. The Times Top 100 Award that the company has won for several years running is also fabricated and not a true reflection of the company. As has been mentioned in previous reviews, staff are coached on what answers to give on the questionnaire and nobody dares to be honest about how the company is actually run for fear of being sacked. You need to have an extremely thick skin to work at TPP and for the way you get treated there and the lack of job security, I really wouldn’t recommend applying for a job there. The perks really don’t outweigh the cons.