In reflecting on my time at Slalom I tried to come up with points as neutral and informative as possible. However, I once read a review here on Glassdoor that said something along the lines of “don’t leave a good position to come here” and I think that reflects my sentiment. While there is a good aspect or two, in time, if you prioritize your character projection based on your work product rather than social likability you will be disappointed with Slalom.
There are some considerable organizational issues brought up in these reviews that are not easily addressed. It will take reflection and action by leadership to solve them.
There will be many reviews that focus on pay, hours, time off, etc. - quantitative things. However, these are easy to control and I’ll let other reviewers focus on those. Slalom has trouble in the qualitative areas: politics, accountability, etc.
- The culture and work environment is political. You must have very high competency in this area in order to succeed at Slalom.
- Skills among staff are not inventoried or leveraged optimally. The lack of a skill inventory amplifies a social importance factor since likability and self-promotion are the few factors leadership has to use to match staff to projects if project-skill matching even occurs.
- Middle-level leadership is lacking quality - When I think of an ideal leader, I think, “What can I do to be more like this person? What qualities do they have that I want? What could I learn from them?” There were few people that I worked for at Slalom where I was able to even approach these questions.
- Accountability and responsibility across all levels was murky leading to ‘do now, think later’ half-completed, abandoned, or poorly considered initiatives.
- Despite a formal process, timely feedback was rarely given by superiors.
- Colleagues never seemed to like to work together to achieve for the betterment of the company, it felt more individualistic.
- My experience with payroll and benefits was inconsistent and took too much time to solve errors.
- The local model leads to redundant and/or fragmented operations between offices.
