Having previously been employed by a French owned company and being thoroughly impressed by their meritocratic ideals and egalitarian structure - I accepted a role with Hachette and I was looking forward to working for a company with a similar ethos. But after a while it became apparent that despite their intentions this wasn’t the case and quickly became disappointed with their approach to management both at a personal and a workload level.
While HR publicise their ambitions values and mindset, they can appear to only apply to a select few of the management hierarchy. Who then proceed to question those who wish to take advantage of those policies, one example (of a few) was homeworking, which was seen as a privilege to our department where requests were often questioned, refused or ridiculed. This was contrary to flexible policy and those who were deemed able to utilise this privilege did so without the same level of scrutiny, which made it seem exploitative and abused solely because of their position.
Technical decisions are generally made without the input of those who should be directly or technically involved and when implementation has gone off track work was often offloaded to those who could have eased the initial execution of the project. Competence and experience are ignored at the behest of managerial ego with a pseudo nepotistic and location bias to workload allocation.
Towards the end of my tenure there seemed to be a culture where disciplinary routes were often pursued rather than complimentary management techniques to resolve issues. This was exacerbated by increasing micro-management and a total lack of transparency. Where changing procedures without notice or consultation is common place, constantly being undermined which was feeding an undercurrent of negativity and the continuing degradation of team morale.
