Howden reviews

- Was a highly stressful working environment caused primarily by poor management behaviours and bullying. - Lots of mundane work, HX had very little, if any innovation. Vest majority of products had been built elsewhere before! - No real business strategy, acquiring brokers and trying to integrate data without any kind of serious plan, is not going to work! - Grand marketing visions actually had very little content, this disconnect between reality, translated into a stressful working environment for those told to “make things happen”. - Lack of competency in management, where bad people were hired into the big roles. Their salesmanship was not a substitute for competence, and was eventually discovered, at great expense to the firm. - unwillingness for management to make the difficult decisions around “the how”, as it grated against their narrative. Personal face took precedence over anything else. - No real collaboration between teams, other than a few units that cut through the BS. - Bonus structures encouraged staff to work against each other. - Tech stack was built on sand, hardly cutting edge, often timeliness prioritised over quality of products.

- old systems & great reluctance to move away from Excel and paper, no actual payment system in a payment-making function - and only high value payments at that ! - manipulative & abusive manager. Don't get fooled by his smiles and charm - it's just an act. Behind closed doors he will turn into a completely different person. Google "covert narcissist" and rest assured you will experience every single behaviour described. Which are all forms of emotional and psychological abuse. - circular discussions with the manager spanning over months and years (keep in mind he is a very skilled manipulator) and nothing gets resolved. Ever. - chronic invalidation of reality/experience by manager & trivialization of issues raised - increases in workload due to either manager himself adding daily processes or due to busier than usual times are not even acknowledged or recognized, forget about praise. Same goes for the results these increases bring - more stress, less time, energy and focus for other tasks - manager acts like they don't exist/happen. When there are visible negative consequences of your ever growing workload, manager will claim "he didn't know" you were that overloaded. - manager's actions rarely match his words & lots of catch 22s, double standards, moving goal posts and bait-and-switch in interactions with manager; help is promised and when asked denied with phrases like "I'm not convinced, I don't see it that way, I don't believe you" - lack of accountability from manager. After the "i don't believe you" episode where of course he didn't help, I went on a medical leave due to stress from work. No adjustments in my workload were made when I came back, despite the medical leave quoting "stress from work" as the cause. Because nothing changes if nothing changes, it was followed by a second medical leave a few months later, which the manager straight up called "taking a rest". - HR sided with the manager, turned things into a me problem - ie. the problem was my reaction to the abuse, not the abuse. Told me to "increase my medication" (yes, these words exactly) instead of addressing and stopping the ongoing abuse. This coming from a senior HR partner too, in 2022, so yeah. - Also same gaslighting, invalidating and circular discussions with HR as with manager. - manager actually increased my workload after the second medical leave, and that too did not raise any eyebrows with either HR or upper management. Of course, I had a colleague who hadn't been on even a single medical leave because of stress from work, but adding the extra work to him never occurred to anyone, and was immediately rejected when I suggested it. They also told me they were not planning to hire an additional person - assume they thought with their circular discussions I wouldn't notice they didn't actually take any actions or measure to improve my workload and make it more manageable. I did. - I left without even having accepted another offer, seeing I'm talking to deaf ears and nobody is actually making things right