Hachette UK reviews

Flexible working is made out to be encouraged and practiced across all levels but in reality only applies to management level staff, or those whom it suits. You would be questioned and made to feel uncomfortable for asking to take a day from home for a one off doctors appointment weeks in advance. On the other hand across management it was common to have a working from home day, there is a flexible policy I agree... if you are management. Hachette offered me no flexibility towards the end of my service. Relevant training was promised during my time within the team, these promises were never delivered and I was always left disappointed. The one course I was placed on without prior knowledge until booked was advanced level and provided almost no benefit for me. I chased training for the first nine months of last year, however it was then made clear to me that I would not receive this and that I was advised to self study. This is no problem but I received no financial support and this made my training objective impossible to achieve, I was not in a position to put cash into this and this was raised multiple times to management but fell on deaf ears. I must reiterate the fact that this was after nine full months of promises, the hardest part of this was seeing other team members go on training courses paid for by the company. I could see at this point that Hachette offered me no further development. As far as workload goes there were obvious favourites in the team, who received the bulk of the work. Technical decisions were often made without any input of a technical resource, this lead to a ‘just get it working approach’ which was seen constantly but was never considered as something that could be done better. When considering replacements or new systems, it was clear management held their own agenda on what they wanted and would force it upon the team without consultant of the technical architect. These projects eventually went nowhere due to decision makers being left out until the last minute by management. This led to half finished tasks being dumped onto other members of the team, forcing panic with an unachievable deadline promised to stakeholders. Throughout my last six months at Hachette it was very clear that bad management techniques were really starting to impact the morale of the team. Examples include management mentioning on more than one occasion in personal and team meetings that they can do our jobs but aren’t paid to and changing important policies without notifying staff. All of this mixed in with poor communication and no 121s had spiralled morale well out of control.

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.