Pros
On-site gym that costs next-to nothing. Clean, modern offices. Genuinely the nicest colleagues you will ever have the pleasure of working with (if they’re not all made redundant).
Cons
This was once a great company. The people were lovely, the managers supportive, and I could see the real good each branch of the business was trying to do. Within months, this crumbled away. Soon, many of the qualified and hardworking staff were being made redundant (well, they call it ‘redundancy’, but you’re asked to clear your desk and leave the building immediately without saying goodbye to anyone, and none of the traditional rules of redundancy are adhered to, so you can read this as ‘fired’). In their place, unqualified friends and relatives of the senior staff were hired. Let me spell this out for you: NEPOTISM. The CEO of TM is basically Donald Trump. If he likes you, of course your brother can have a job! So, while the employees who have the skills and experience to do the job toil away endlessly for very little money or recognition, the clique swan in and out on a paycheque agreed by the CEO that’s higher than that of the people put in charge of managing them. They then spend their time faffing about offloading all their work on to someone else. And it should go without saying that there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it, because the senior management look after their own. So, if one of their brothers squares up to you and yells a load of expletives at you for daring to ask him to do some work, you can guess the outcome – sweet FA. We all knew the company was struggling, but things came to the crunch when a major IT operation attempted to switch the TM accounts over to our own custom system. This would save the company money not only by taking care of everything in-house, but also by moving more of the customer journey online – meaning that many of the staff on the phones could be removed. Of course, it all went disastrously wrong. So all the people on the phones had to work around the clock for weeks to answer the calls of customers who had checked their account to find no money there, or who had been fined because their payments hadn’t gone out. Literally, they were working extra hours in horrendous circumstances to mop up the mess caused by a system designed to replace them. Demoralising doesn’t really cut it. In terms of the actual business, soon the fees on the accounts that were helping so many people manage their money went up. These are customers who live hand-to-mouth and struggle to open an account elsewhere. Then, the loans business started to offer products that were, for all intents and purposes, payday loans with insane interest rates to match. This flew in the face of all the work we had done to market ourselves as an alternative to payday loan companies. Bye bye ethics! The CEO is treated like God at TM. He doesn’t like brown shoes, stubble, piercings on men, tattoos on anyone, and God forbid you wear a jumper over your shirt, because he will make you pay for it. If you’re a woman, don’t even bother. Either you’ll be subjected to harassment (“I’m sure you must have a copy of the Good Sex Guide at home”) or chauvinistic bullying (“She’d look alright if she ate less cakes”). If you’re a woman, there is zero chance of you progressing your career at TM. Apparently, that XX chromosome means you are absolutely incapable of doing anything more than answering the phones, being someone’s junior and wearing heels. On top of that, the CEO makes decisions on a whim - perhaps just because he’s heard something on the radio that morning - and the whole company of 1,000-odd people has to act accordingly. Entire marketing campaigns are started and abandoned at great cost inside of a few weeks because he’s changed his mind. The rest of the management team then have to sell this to the other employees as a good thing and not just the mad demands of an overgrown and over-indulged man-child. For the last eight months at TM, it was not unusual for me to see people crying. My walk from the car park to the office took longer each day. I suffered anxiety and insomnia, started smoking again and cried frequently, which I put down to all manner of things. Yet within days of leaving, my anxiety was gone and I was sleeping like a baby. Turns out, it was all TM.