The RSA Reviews

The CEO is a nasty piece of work, and the efforts he's put into alienating staff has been really something. Pay for staff has been held down for years while exec pay went up, pensions were cut significantly in Covid and then raised again by a small fraction of what they were. Management talk the talk of participation and acting on inequality, but refused to voluntarily recognise the union and made it very clear that they did not want people to unionise, to the extent of threatening redundancies as the only way to raise pay (this in an organisation with £32m of reserves). I can think of two senior positions filled with cronies of the CEO without due process, there may be more. In meetings there have been times when the CEO was bullying and undermining of colleagues. Trustees are distant from staff.

This is a message to anyone who's seen a job role at the RSA and is thinking either 'can it really be that bad?' or 'this probably won't affect the role I'm going for'. If you're reading this, you'll have read the other reviews, so I won't repeat what's already been said. But to be clear: there's no person, in any part of the business, who hasn't been adversely affected by the current leadership's paranoid, paternalistic, aggressive and business-illiterate 'approach' (although describing it as such gives too much credit to their completely chaotic way of working). As a result of so many people leaving - in some cases within a year of starting - junior staff are finding themselves line-managed by senior management who have no understanding of their work or sympathy for their concerns. Micro-management means that people at every level are not given the freedom to do their jobs, often being told to do things which are completely against their professional instincts, not to say common sense. The constant brain drain and gaping holes in management structure are starting to affect how things function on a basic level. Just a horrible thing to happen to an organisation with such a rich history, and which until very recently was doing valuable work. Absolutely cannot recommend as long as current leadership remains in place.