Deutsche Bank reviews

Senior management have buried their heads in the sand for too many years regarding the cost challenge that the business continues to face. Forced in the last couple of years (quite rightly) by John Cryan & shareholders to finally tackle this issue the (unfortunately) necessary restructures have been managed very badly. Senior management in some divisions have made short term panicked decisions ultimately prioritising saving themselves & favourite senior long servers (high cost employees in high cost locations). They have made lower cost mid to junior level employees redundant or just moved “deckchairs around on the deck of the Titanic”. Many have not made decisions based on robust business reasons. In some isolated examples it has been worse still. I have seen examples of totally unethically miss managing people & making the environment so toxic that people have left of their own accord nearly broken. This of course has failed to tackle the cost challenge and has resulted in multiple badly managed rounds of redundancies within months in the same areas. This has left moral very low for those left and has blocked career paths for years to come. This does not set the bank up for success and will drive down moral further over the medium to long term. COOs are in the main unskilled in their field and have little understanding, control or governance in their areas. There is no sign of this improving, only more responsibility being delegated to already failing individuals. HR are being “dumbed down” to administrators & processors with strong capable people leaving this department in large numbers in the last 18 months. These two issues (COO & HR combined) mean that management do not have capable or trusted advisors & are also not challenged to make short, medium AND long term cost decisions whilst restructuring by humanely exiting the right mix of people to allow the business to rebuild sustainably.

Where to begin - please note this is based on working in IT Infrastructure (London office) and so may not be typical of the company as a whole, only my experience of it in this area: - a culture of long hours where they aren't required! Sure we all have times when we have to stay late, or even want to stay to finish off that project or meet that deadline. But here people consciously stay at their desks and chat, go on facebook, make personal calls etc, until 8-9pm, then make a show of sighing and leaving, and come in the next morning (often around 10am due to their 'late night') and tell everyone how they never left until 9pm. And they actually gain promotion on the basis of this!! - constantly driving down costs and reducing teams who do all the work, resulting in teams of 1 or 2 running entire regions, all the while keeping multiple layers of management. As an example, you can have 2 people reporting to a VP, reporting to another VP, reporting to a D, reporting to another D, reporting to an MD, reporting to another MD before you advance to any real level in the company. The amount of money being saved is completely negated by a completely unnecessary hierarchy - completely sexist - no women advance in this area unless they 'look good'. Those who don't have to work hard but never advance - advancement based on friendships and contacts rather than achievement and potential - no clear focus of where they are headed - the same projects and improvements cycle every few years justifying projects and looking to change and improve standards with no real intention to do so - offices falling apart and drive towards 'clear desk policy' whereby all staff work on a stark white open desk with no privacy walls, and have to put all desk and personal items in a locker (no pedastals allowed under desks) result in offices with all the charm and personality of a hospital - the lowest morale of any company I have worked in (over 20 years City/finance experience) - the new CEOs came on board with the amazing idea of reducing Infrastructure by 60%. I know they're not sexy like the traders, but they keep the rest of you running! Don't forget that! - more of an opinion this one, but every single person I encounter where the subject of DB comes up has some sort of bad story - "I know someone who worked there who had a nervous breakdown", "aren't they a terrible company to work for", "I've heard they're bad". Now as I say, this is opinion, but I've never had this for any other place I've worked, and as mentioned above I have 20+ yrs of corporations And this is all that immediately comes to mind. I'm sure if I had a think I could find a lot more!