While the people in the company are typically academics who know a healthy amount about their areas of expertise, they are terrible operators. Projects lack discipline, well structured processes, technology and adherence to deadlines. Commonly over budget, delivered late and with systemic errors to customers. Checks and balances are seen as administration and not applied due to insufficient capacity, time and value.
The company is bloated with inefficient processes, driven by long tenured/ complacent employees who remain at the job due to insecurity rather than passion. This is exaggerated by long tenured senior management who have limited to no working experience in any other company other than Roy Morgan, but preach about the breadth of their experience while ignoring any advice/new ideas from new employees brought in specifically to resolve this issues.
Senior management have extremely traditional and rigid mindsets. They are closed off to new ideas and hyper focused on saving money and doing the bare minimum to meet customer requirements, even if by doing so......it ends up costing the company more money. It is perplexing to work in a company that sells data and insights to big companies but completely blind when looking at its own internal performance.
Technology is ancient and is only upgraded when previous technology fails or their absolutely forced to invest to customer requirements (which they fight tooth and nail to try make the customer pay for). As a market research company, they fall behind significantly in applying modern practices and systems.
The pay is horrendous low and pay rises are uncommon for incumbent staff but strangely, is quite generous when attracting new senior management to the company. This signals that the company has little faith in its existing workforce and is looking externally.
The employee churn at the company is outrageously high, particularly for interviewers which they view as an expendable/consumable product. When challenged on this, management have said this is the cost of doing business, while simultaneously criticising that cost of business is too high.
The building is old and disgusting. Paint on walls is flaking, limited toilets in the building which are dirty due to overuse. Everyone must bring in their own cutlery and even crockery (bowls, cups etc) because there is non available.
The entire company operates through its CEO and COO. This creates massive decision making bottlenecks which have to flow down through the various bureaucratic layers which is particularly excessive given the company only has 300 corporate employees. The expectation for all other employees is to be useful idiots and wait for instructions before acting however management take no accountability for their bad decisions and vocally let individuals know how poorly they're performing (despite acting on the exact instructions/task provided by said executive).