It all comes down to trust, or lack thereof - Consultant ION Group Employee Review

It all comes down to trust. I'm not speaking about trusting someone to pay you back a fiver they've borrowed off of you for lunch. No I'm talking about the culture of institutional mistrust that exists and adds to the cost of doing just about anything in the organisation. - CEO sets incredibly high, even unattainable, standards: This is not in itself a problem, if this kind of attitude is channelled correctly it's actually a good thing imo. It is the lack of appropriate feedback, the lack of consistency, and the misplaced responsibility that this creates that adds to internal costs. This leads employees. to feel mistrusted to carry out the work that they are closest to and should no most about because it is under constant and repetitive review. - Lack of investment in people: there is an issue here of trust between management and employees. Management trust that people will leave before they can see a return on any investment that they make whether this be training programs designed internally or qualifications and outsourced models. When people don't feel invested in they blame others when something they don't understand or know crops up, and when people blame others, this breaks down trust even further division by division. If people feel mistrusted because they're under constant review, they feel doubly so by being blamed for not knowing something that they were never told in the first place. - Lack of visibility: although this has changed in recent years the lack of overall visibility across the business is because employees are not trusted to make connections themselves. They're encouraged yes, "go cross divisional" "work with others" but any major programs of work need senior input because they and only they know the bigger picture. Why? No one else is trusted with it. This leads to any real sense of entrepreneurialism waning quite quickly. A lot of good ideas but not a lot of follow through unless someone close to the CEO has had the idea. If you don't know what goal you're striving towards as a collective company, you don't feel a part of a company you feel like a part of a company within a company. This division leads to mistrust which leads to .... you see where I'm going here I'll move on. While this is obviously my opinion, I think there are symptoms to back that up. - No middle management - why? Well because you're either a do'er on someone in senior "leadership". This is a key symptom of mistrust at an organisational level. - Role confusion - what do I mean by this? Well its always good to see a bit of everything in any role that you do and get involved across the team. That should really stop though when people start acting as the entire team. It is not feasible that someone can span across three roles. - Staff turnover and lack of replacement - why do staff leave? All of the above. Should we hire? Okay but there might be a wait. What's the timing? I don't know. Well what's the wait? It's still being reviewed and senior staff haven't gotten around to it yet and don't know when they will. Why? Lack of trust (broken record here). So that's the causes, and the symptoms, what is the result? The result is a top heavy, opaque, and uninspiring organisation. Underneath it really has great people and great products. However this is crushed under the implicit costs of doing your day to day job due to lack of trust at the most fundamental levels. Usually things are delivered to a client on-time that is no doubt. This only happens though due to the squeeze on day to day staff, not because it is anyway an efficient enterprise. Client satisfaction is something totally different and I don't know if Glassdoor is going to fix that so no point in commenting.