Armstrong is a very low trust environment where bullying, harassment and favouritism are rife. Management don’t trust you to work from home, manage your own workload or arrive and leave on time. While they micromanage these parts of your work life the management never care to check in on you or take an interest in your work, but will tear you down if a mistake slips the net.
Work life balance is non existent, you will have to work in the office 5 days a week with no flexible start or finish times. There’s a shutdown over Christmas which comes out of your meagre holiday allowance. City centre parking is expensive and the staff car park is first come first served but it’s implied only senior staff can even use it. You’ll have 30 minutes to grab lunch and run back to your desk. If you leave at 5.30 as your contract states you will be silently judged, as you’ll find your workload is so overwhelming that staying late for 30 minutes to an hour nearly everyday becomes the norm and is taken for granted. Sick pay is discretionary and until very recently there was no HR for a team of 50+ people.
Promotions come grudgingly despite experience (except for client services where the turnover is so great that someone fresh out of university can go from junior account executive to a senior account manager within a year), and are provided with caveats and implications that you owe them. Development and training is something they’re keen to mention on their website but the reality is that you will be so over faced with churn work and tight deadlines that there will never be any plans put in place, and any suggestion of learning new tools or software is generally scoffed at by management.
During my time at Armstrong I witnessed the following:
• Members of staff being removed from the premises in the middle of the work day after handing in their notice simply to embarrass them
• Members of staff being admonished due to their relationships outside of work
• Members of staff having breakdowns over the demands of the job above and beyond their duties