Staff morale at all time low. - Associate Financial Conduct Authority Employee Review

Staff morale has taken a nosedive, which has accelerated over the last 6 months. I believe it started to go down slightly after the move to Stratford, which is a terrible location with the office practically in the Westfield Shopping Centre. Compared to Canary Wharf, the options for going out to lunch with colleagues or socialising are poor. Before covid there were massive queues to get in the building each morning, before waiting ages for a lift to be crammed in like sardines. The open plan office is loud, with people running around having pointless meetings about meetings. In general, people take themselves very seriously meaning its not a very fun place to work. This seriousness permeates the whole culture of the FCA, reflecting in a ridiculous amount of governance, micromanagement and the feeling of being under constant scrutiny. Its difficult to get anything done without being bogged down in red tape, despite the fact the work must always be carried out 'at pace'. This can be stressful and frustrating. The organisation itself is supposed to be independent and apolitical but nothing could be further from the truth. You will be bombarded with "woke" at every opportunity which sometimes feels like it is deliberately designed to waste your time and demoralize you. If they just focused on their job of regulating, a lot more would get done. When covid hit, we told to down tools on whatever we were working on and got reassigned to the covid response. This was a really good time as the whole organisation felt as though it had regained its mission and we were responding in real time to the crisis. However, after a few months, at a time when the FCA should have been rolling back all the red tape and wokeism, they doubled down on it. The new CEO joined in the middle of a pandemic promising to "tranform" the organisation, even though it was working pretty effectively before. After 6 months of this transformation program, its not exactly clear what has changed, apart from lots of new exec level people that don't know what they are doing. Good staff are leaving in droves.