Fantastic advertising agency - Production Coordinator Aylesworth Fleming Employee Review

The client was lovely, proactive and really believes in their product.

I spent 3 months at Aylesworth Fleming, where I was ignored and marginalised, before being unceremoniously dumped when I tried to raise my concerns. I joined on 4 days notice and was compelled to burn bridges with existing commitments to start work on time, but then I spent 3 months twiddling my thumbs waiting for something to do. I was told nothing about the scope of the work that the agency was doing for the client, and they knew nothing about the the exciting and expansive job role I interviewed for and accepted. There was no line management support. My line manager was completely absent - except for the odd chat about timesheet software so they could bill the client. I was encouraged to pad the timesheets out, even though I was doing very little. I gave them a quarter of a year to get organised, but as soon as I expressed unhappiness and tried to renegotiate the terms of working I had no choice but to formally resign or risk triggering the 1 week probation notice period in my contract. I was shuffled off with less than 3 weeks notice in the middle of a pandemic.

The company has some great people that work there. It's very handy for train and bus routes Some degree of training, but not much Can be a good culture with annual events and booze trolleys Bi-annual company status reports (though they are skewed to only tell you the best bits) Some nice benefits, Denplan, Childscheme Vouchers, Healthplan etc... They do try to make the culture good but it takes everyone to take part and if that doesn't happen it falls flat.

Management do not take responsibility when things go wrong Communication between departments is poor Fairly steady job, no real drive from management to give you progression or training to improve your growth Quite a high turnover of staff, either through regular bulk redundancies or people getting fed up of their roles Nobody has time to update others on jobs. High workloads (and far too many unnecessary email comms) and senior management don't seem to care or take that on board There is a blame culture for sure, as it seems many staff will bombard with emails just to cover themselves so they can blame you when things go wrong. Senior management don't really know what people's actual jobs are and what's involved. They just seem to know your title and your name. Work/life balance doesn't seem to apply in terms of start and finish times, people DO leave on time, which is good, but there is no flexibility in when you can start and end. Not enough on site parking. Salaries are not the best in the industry (unless you are senior management) Pay rises don't happen very often Performance reviews are given by the people that you choose, which seems quite strange Many longer standing members of staff are set in their ways and only do work as they've always done (including senior mangagement) and some teams are very catty Senior management seem to all try to overpower one another in their decisions, meaning that projects take far longer to complete than they should No real 'collective idea generation', meaning that only the views of 1 or 2 people are taken on board when dealing with a client brief, when in fact there are plenty of extremely talented people that they could be utilising within the agency Not a lot of processes in place, other than for billing, accounts, etc... There could be so much more organisation. Due to lack of training between departments, there is often a lot of 'explaining and comms/admin' that takes up more time than doing the actual job.