Terrible management - Policy Analyst Eurofound Employee Review

2.0
12 Apr 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

very engaging topics, some inspiring colleagues, international reach

Cons

All senior managers are bureaucrats with no research background or experience in spite of the fact that they are tasked to run large-scale quantitative surveys. They resolve the conflict between their competences and their tasks by assigning their work to young researchers and then taking all decisions and credit for the work. And not only that, but they make their decisions with complete disregard to scientific arguments and establish empirical findings. Instead, their decisions either reflect their personal interests (e.g. self-promotion) or various political aspects (e.g. appeasing certain board members that they find important for them for one reason or another). Promotions are completely relieved of any relationship to merit. Some senior managers in charge of international surveys that collect data from half a million respondents do not know how to open a dataset. Of course, this is all made possible by their director, who is the master of them all in abuse of resources and given power for reasons of personal promotion. E.g. they used to hire researchers with PhD degree through temporary hiring agency, paying them around 1000 EUR per month and asking them to do work of regular policy analysts, while director (with his 15k EUR salary) is taking himself to London for a month-long 'professional development' course that costed Eurofound, and thus EU taxpayers 20,000 EUR, plus all travel and accommodation costs. And yes, all that while the agency is working on improving 'working conditions' for all the workers around Europe, based on principle that 'equal work requires equal pay'..

Explore other reviews about Eurofound

2.0
19 Mar 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The good thing about jobs at Eurofound is that you are employed in the public sector, thus, there are decent benefits possible. The topic being researched is valuable.

Cons

The experience of individual employees depends heavily on the people in the unit and in project teams. One can get rather unlucky with that, and end up with a boss who would never greet you, colleagues who talk down and shame other employees, and humiliating behaviour from those above. Eurofound calls itself a research organisation, but really what it does is quantitative data collection. There is little engagement with the actual meaning behind the data and the people do not seem passionate about the topics they work on. Rather, they are caught up in the nice life they live collecting data on actual people that are oftentimes not from well-off backgrounds, like most Eurofound employees seem to be. There is no acknowledgement of the fact that Eurofound employees are living an incredibly privileged life and have largely done so before their time at Eurofound too. This is concerning considering that Eurofound aims to 'improve the living and working conditions' of all while being completely detached from what the life of average people looks like.

5.0
26 Jan 2025
Anonymous contractor
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

People are very friendly and welcoming, making it a great place to explore and develop your abilities.

Cons

It is difficult to secure a contract with good conditions and long-term stability.

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