Pros
I love it here. Here are a few of the reasons why this is a great place: * Excellent work / life balance. * Lovely colleagues make a very nice atmosphere to work in. * We do important work, help people and have the opportunity to make a difference. * Often stimulating and challenging work. * Great location (near Canary Wharf). * Great office building. * Subsidised canteen. * Great benefits, including BUPA health coverage. * Good pension scheme. It's just such a terrible shame about all the stuff I've had to write about below. This used to be my dream job.
Cons
* Massively ill-conceived and poorly-implemented restructuring of the organisation. * Total disdain for financial and technical knowledge, expertise and experience. * New business model in which everyone is expected to be a "jack of all trades and master of none." * Micro-managing of investigators, instead of trusting them to do their jobs like adults. * Low morale as a result of all the above. * Exclusively white and male executive team (apart from the CEO, who has surrounded herself with yes-men) who refuse to listen to feedback from their staff. Consequently the only way people can say what they think is here, on Glass Door. That's no way to run an organisation. The problem is that, in order to save money (somehow), we are replacing the old system in which people specialised in certain areas -- pensions, investments, mortgages, banking and consumer credit, insurance etc -- with a new system of "multi-skilling" in which no-one is expected (or realistically able) to know much about anything, and will have to deal with every single kind of complaint about any kind of product. This totally devalues specialist knowledge. Yes, we make decisions which are "fair and reasonable," but we also still have to have regard for relevant laws and regulations as well, and there are too many of those for someone to know them all. This new way of working was piloted, but then was rolled out Service-wide before even waiting for the pilot to finish! That proves the trials were a sham all along -- they were always going to force this through no matter what. Also, the most experienced people are being driven out of the service by pay caps which are blatantly designed to force the best people out (I'm referring to grade 2 ombudsmen, the backbone of the Service -- now try to imagine an army with no sergeants). Soon there will not be enough good people to salvage the Service from this godawful mess once the Board wake up and realise the catastrophe we are hurtling towards. We are sacrificing quality and integrity in the service we provide, and jeopardising the credibility and reputation of a once wonderful -- and still very important -- dispute resolution service which gives people the opportunity to sort out serious problems without having to go through the expense and time of litigation. People are being forced to apply for jobs they don't want for fear of the consequences of not applying. A notable example: the new combined role of "ombudsman manager," which neither managers nor ombudsmen wanted to do. And then forcing them to micro-manage their investigators instead of letting them adopt the style of management that best suits them. And I can't imagine that the investigators enjoy being micro-managed in such a condescending way, treating them like children. They used to be trusted, capable adults who were highly-motivated in their roles. Now they're demoralised and who can blame them? The executive team don't want to listen to feedback. When we said "yes, we understand why change needs to happen" we did't mean that we agreed with the form the changes have taken, just that we understood that we have to save money somehow. We could break even just by increasing the PPI supplementary fee from zero to £100. But no, instead we're going to cut the best people's pay and get rid of them instead. Nice one. Nobody feels that they can voice their dissent, except anonymously on this website. No-one feels valued. Morale has sunk low. Everyone at the coal face is unanimously of the view that this is a terrible idea, but the executive is oblivious and the Board appears not to know or care what is happening. They need to fire Caroline Wayman and all the grade 5 and 6 ombudsmen (who aren't real ombudsmen and who don't understand what the real ombudsmen, adjudicators and investigators do) and bring back Natalie Ceeney or Walter Merricks. They would sort this mess out, and would understand that someone who voices a dissenting opinion isn't a trouble-maker or a malcontent, but just a loyal employee with a love for the Service, an independent mind, and a constructive, well-intentioned alternative opinion. That used to be an asset, once.