Woodmac is structural messy. Good research work requires either very technical people or lots of low paid minions but Woodmac seems to have ended up with lots of middle managers who fulfill neither role. Therefore Woodmac is stuffed with people who have little to do except bombard each other with emails, and far too few people who are asked to do most of the groundwork. The managers, keen to show how much their team is doing, end up being quite an angry and aggressive bunch overall, as they pressurise their minions into doing lots of work, for not a lot of money. I never really witnessed workplace bullying until I started at Woodmac. Some of the experienced cohort genuinely still believe in the "rule by fear" approach to management, as if they were looking after primary school kids.
What happens after you spend a couple of years of hard graft working in said conditions? Well you get a pat on the back and virtually no pay rise (2% maybe). The company has outrageous margins on its employees but is keen to ever decrease its costs. The company sees it as more important to keep its cost base low rather than keep good people. If you want a pay rise, sorry, you should have joined before 2010 when you could have been part of the gang. The revolving door of people leaving isn't an issue, it's a tactic. The reason the company is stuffed with middle managers now is that it made the "mistake" of giving decent pay to people in the past and they all stayed (imagine!).
The upper management is a bit of mystery - as if there is a sudden disconnect in the org chart beyond which you have no idea who they are or what they do. Some are totally invisible. A certain someone read in a book that you should shake people's hands at a town hall and thinks that qualifies as enough to be seen as friendly and parochial. The upper management need to be far more visible and engaged with the research. They seem to live in a world of incessant emailing on inane decisions like pointlessly restructuring the business every 6 months. The constant chopping and changing of people at senior level indicates something isn't right in there or the hiring practices are all off.
If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. And Woodmac is happy to have monkeys, preferably data monkeys who can repetitively just update a few spreadsheets every week to feed into the new Lens product, which is quite clear will be used as a tool to lower the needed volume and quality of employees (and lower wages as a result hurrah!). The new "sprint" terminology used on a weekly basis is a psychological catastrophe, which could only be dreamed up by sociopaths. Employees spend every day being harassed as to what they have done yesterday from said cohort of fear-ruling managers. It's not pleasant long-term.
