More cons than pros really. This company tops my list as the most complex and chaotic place I had worked. The only reason to stay is because of a team of very understanding and supportive management and their continuous strive towards improvement of the work environment . Otherwise, here's the list of cons:
1. Work life balance is bad for a company that has a vision of improving health for billions of people. My mental and physical health have definitely suffered from the lean structure but super ambitious goals cascaded down with work and trigger happy ideas from working the region that requires a huge team of people to do the work, but there isn't.
2. Too many meetings, daily 80% business hours a day is spent on meetings after meetings, and eventually no time to do the work, or to focus on what matters to drive scale. So, no choice but gotta work late, or suffer the consequences. Also, be ready not to hv control of your workday, people will just block time your for meetings, even if it is lunch time. Whatever slot they can find, so to get it off their chest, their plates or whatever their intent is. So be sure to block time to eat.
3. Many complex processes and systems with gaps everywhere. Some system tools just continuously have issues, preventing timely execution and or to execute with excellence. 1001 separate systems and tool to use, and some tools are just not intuitive. To get full picture of something, be ready to extract info from different tools to put it together manually, super time consuming.
4. When face with system issues, standard words from anyone would be "Raise a ticket to IT". And there we are, all operations is now just a ticket, in the hands of people who really doesn't care much about how that glitch affect the business.
5. Some categories leaders from regions are just super pushy and forceful, and doesn't want to even try to understand market operations issues we have to deal with everyday that are impeding certain intents or ambitions. Very different from management team who provides solutions. Sometimes, I do think these pushy people only wanted to look good and succeed on their own, not the team up spirit that the company try to foster. Also, if they work long hours or a workaholic, they expect others to be like them. Frequently getting request emails in the late afternoon to ask for something complex (requiring plenty involvement from different stakeholders), to be delivered next morning. While negotiation on deadline is possible, but be ready to hear snide remarks. To be fair, there are also people who are extremely helpful and understanding towards a new team, and I believe these are the people who want to succeed as a team.
6. Chaotic work processes at present, but kudos to management team who hear people on the ground, and working towards improvement and closing those gaps. While it is not perfect, but the effort is appreciated.
7. Many inconsistencies when working with different business groups. Also, plenty issues and mistakes from information cascaded down globally. They ain't feeling the pain from local operations resulted from all these inconsistencies.
8. New people feel extremely overwhelmed. 1st week of joining, we are not just bombarded with plenty of onboarding and system tools orientations (and navigating a new organisation wfh is not exactly the easiest) but also plenty of work , some of which were pending for few months. The pressure to complete doesn't come from management but the working level team, and we are expected to solve the issues without context. People lack empathy, and regardless if one is one week old or one month old, they just push for completion just to get it off their plates.
9. Fridays are the designated days by the company as a no meeting day so employee can spend time thinking, planning for work etc. But who cares right, most people dont respect it and will continue to block time for meetings.
10. Management are trusting and supportive in building skills and experineces for new team, but some people at the working level aren't. Many times, you will notice people who has been in the organisation for a long time, in their snide comments and remarks seems to insinuate that the new people sit around and do nothing. High turnover rate.
Overall, happiness index for me, definitely low.
