Company: PwC
Date: 2015-11-07
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Support service faces Dowton Abbey style culture
Pros: Great name to have on your CV, nice to work in such a big organisation, but that does have its own cons. A young motivated workforce.
Cons: Unfortunately working in a support function does not bring with it the same advantages as being client facing staff. Hence my title, support staff are treated as the help under the stairs. Opinions are rarely asked for, and most concerning is when things do not go  as they should, the business tries to get client facing staff to sort it out, as if they are the only ones with brains in their heads. The only advantage of this is they then see how challenging the roles of resource management can be.
The most frustrating thing to me was the fact that our support function, which was resource management, had to ensure that our BU facilitated business unit staff to go away on secondments and get on the right jobs for promotion. However none of these perks were available to my staff. The boost that would have given the teams if they could go away on secondment for a few months would have been immeasurable. But unfortunately it was seen as far too difficult even to allow a swap of offices for a few months for a change of perspective.
The biggest downside to PWC is the lack of leadership, individuals confuse leadership with management. There are some technically fantastic people who know their stuff and as such can manage activity very well. However brave tenacious and inspirational leadership was seriously lacking, I would even be moved to say a lot of senior people had an air of cowardice about them, which I know sounds harsh but I think in some areas it is fair. The BU I worked in looked after their people very poorly leading to many people leaving. Admittedly there were a few managers who took the role of mentoring and supporting their people seriously and worked hard to develop the people and teams under them, but they were few and far between. Unfortunately due to the matrix environment  individuals performing poorly were in a large number of cases, someone else’s responsibility. I readily admit I met some senior individuals who I would happily follow to the ends of the earth and enjoyed working with, but the vast majority of partners directors, senior manager and managers  I would not trust to get me to the nearest starbucks.