-top heavy leadership with several layers
-extremely disorganized structure. I don’t even know where to begin here.
-long work hours. no where on my offer when I signed on nor was I told that I was expected to work a minimum of 45-50 hours. There was a ton of ambiguity
-no work life balance due to the above. I had to set hard boundaries for myself when to stop working but certain days were harder when there's deadlines to meet. It is almost frowned upon and abnormal to take a 1 hour lunch like a normal employee. It is very common for members on the PL team specifically to not only start work early, work through lunch, work late, but also beyond those "half" days where Kantar supposedly closes early. Not to mention, they love meetings here. I've had days with 9+ meeting markers, half of which could've easily been emails. And we were suppose to get work done how? And it was absolutely common to have meetings through out every lunch hour through out the week. Hence part of the reason why we couldn’t even take a proper lunch break.
-PL leadership lack any empathy to direct reports. Says to come talk to them if we are overwhelmed/need someone to talk to and when we do, we were essentially told to suck it up and are treated like ROBOTS and not a human with emotions. HR has records to back this up of PL’s reporting these situations through H1 2021. And this is the reason why within the month of February alone, at least FOUR members of the PL team resigned. Coincidence? I think not. Let’s not forget throughout the year of 2020, PL’s in the west were expected to go through a C3 transition with extreme expectations that could not be met due to the different types of clients and projects that the West had. It was not a one size fits all but PL’s were expected to take essentially 80% of CL’s responsibilities to projects/clients that didn’t even make any sense to do so. This all happened when the world was going through what we know as the global COVID-19 Pandemic!
-Every legacy hub of Kantar (AV, TNS, etc) operates completely different and there’s a ton of disconnect between processes, ways of working, etc. A complete mess. The hubs will never be aligned.
-You will likely not get any raises. Not even a cost of living increase! All while you are expected to take on more projects, more responsibilities, more mundane processes that don’t make any sense. The pay is low compared to other full service research agencies. There is also no bonus, at least not for PL!
-Extreme redundancy of efforts. Expect to spend a good chunk of your time being completely INEFFICIENT. For example, a certain PL group was expected to do conduct bi-weekly finance meetings with their CL team on projects that were considered loss making in the past. You heard that right. Because folks apparently cannot figure out how their project is doing financially that they need these regular meetings to explain the same thing over to them week to week, ask them why they charged all this time to their timesheets on the job etc. Why were these jobs loss making in the first place? Oh right, because they were priced out by CL leadership that wanted to please difficult clients who nickle and dime with them yet expected all the deliverables in the world. Which then resulted in pressure on the PL team to micromanage all departments who touch a given project about how much time they are allowed to charge to the job. Absolutely unbelievable.
-There are constant resource issues due to high turnover. Between the beginning of the pandemic to this point, there were over 50 employees that left Kantar on the west between CL and PL teams. It first started with massive lay offs. Which then turned into a domino effect where burnt out employees were resigning left and right because there was no empathy and everyone’s work load was not getting any better! I kid you not, the teams spent more time having project transition meetings week to week than on anything else because there were constant departures.
-Client leadership leaders babying clients and not caring about team members doing the grunt work. PERIOD.
-micromanaging timesheet system used to measure team/individual work capacity. Not only is this a flawed measure of team/individual capacity, it is also completely injustice. So you’re telling me a timesheet is suppose to measure how much stress an employee is under? An employee can be punching in 40 hours on their timesheets and 30 of those hours could be them under mountains of stress from project deadlines and pressure from the client and internal clients….Yet this employee is still expected to take on more projects because apparently 30/40 hours of stress doesn’t “show” on the timesheet. We are seen as robots!
-There is little to no room for growth unless you are a robot that takes orders without emotions. If you speak up about your concerns, like I said, you will be told to suck it up. There is no empathy or any actions to fix anything. Only the ones who stay quiet are promoted. Talk about political.
