Culture of Paranoia - Production Manager Cision Employee Review

When I started working at the company, it was a privately owned concern called Durrants. The running of the company was fairly casual but you felt you were recognised for hard work and was rewarded accordingly. Over the years the company was taken over by increasingly larger entities. As Venture Capital came in, so did more and more layers of middle management, all more concerned with making themselves look good or justifying their positions rather than worrying about the actual running of the business. The beginning of the end for UK production began with the acquisition by Cision. The company made no secret of their desire to automate and outsource as much of our department's work as possible and this led to a climate of worry and fear in the office. When a sudden departure of the UK senior management led to the arrival of a US CEO in charge of the UK and Europe, we knew the writing was on the wall. UK Production was all but ignored in the new boss's communications. He was obviously brought in to close the UK's operations, but was two-faced in his approach to this, and eventually, proved to be incompetent in what must be one of the longest, drawn out, redundancy processes in history. As we carried on coming into work for around two years, knowing that we were helping to end our own jobs, a climate of fear and worry was all that abound in the near-empty building at Canary Wharf. The quality of the product which had been one of the notable aspects of the company was now laughable in the errors made by the teams in India and S Africa who were taking over chunks of the production work gradually. It was a sad end to a decent period and a good job, with many great people.