Baringa Partners Employee Reviews about "work life balance"

Pros

- Fantastic team - Great ability to grow professionally - Ability to work on truly diverse and interesting projects - Amazing new offices - Truly collaborative work environment - Pretty flat hierarchy meaning access at all levels to senior individuals

Cons

- Perks aren't as good as larger organisations - Growing pains from accelerated growth in recent years cause some friction - Constant demand outstripping supply can lead to challenges in work / life balance - always busy

Pros

people culture, strong team spirit and great people, interesting projects, big clients, good size business, growth, inclusive and diverse

Cons

Growing means some of the Pros diminish, work-life balance, long hours, client often comes before own people

Pros

Lives its promises and values. Still growing strong and managing to hold onto the plot.

Cons

Least worst at work-life balance. An industry issue dealt with (sort of) at Baringa.

Pros

I left Baringa over the last few months and while I did not initially intend to leave a review I was quite surprised to read some overly exaggerated negative feedback and thought I could share mine. Let's start with what Baringa does well: - Probably the best working culture I have ever experienced in my career - Good non cash benefits (e.g. healthcare and travel cover) - Good understanding that being away from home can be a struggle from a work/life balance perspective. Therefore the company has a pretty unique policy where the more you are away from home the more extra holiday you get as well as salary increase (up to +25% if I remember correctly, could be wrong) - It is one of the few places where I actually made a number of friends, I always felt part of a team that cared for its members - You have a lot of room to explore different business ideas and are encouraged to develop new offerings if you are interested in this, even at the junior level - Base salary is pretty competitive - Quite a few reviews have mentioned the parties, that's true but I would focus more on all the social events. I had a very good time in each one of them - Good career progression, assessment process is pretty transparent and seems fair

Cons

- Pension is absolutely not up to what a company of that size should offer, you get the mandatory minimum - Bonus is not really a bonus but a profit share scheme, it looked like it is below competition for a given grade and banding (at least when I compared against my friends') - Probably too much communication on why Baringa is great, especially when it comes to work life balance. While I had a fantastic time overall at the firm, there were times when was struggling. Same is true for Baringa. Baringa is a very good workplace but not the best and the more the company grows the more people will feel disconnected if the messaging is only about "we are the best". The recent negative reviews on glassdoor prove the point. Gone are the days when Baringa had only 300 employees. Consultants do work hard, it is the nature of the job. While Baringa has an OK work life balance for a consultancy it is definitely worse that what we see at our clients'. - It looks like Baringa has an opportunistic approach to work, would be great to see more emphasis on strategy and have people to actually execute it. - Can Baringa grow and maintain its DNA? It sometimes looked like the firm was headed towards the same type of culture we could see at the Big4/Accenture.

Pros

For consulting, this is as good as it gets. People care about you, they support your personal ambitions and most of the time you work with great colleagues. You can also drive your own career and you are supported to figure out what you enjoy quite early on. Work life balance is discussed a lot and they are always trying new ways to make this lifestyle work for your circumstances

Cons

Pension is well below market average so ask for 5% more in your base salary to compensate. It can feel geared towards people with kids and families and less considerate of those where this may not be their life goal. Also recent hires in the partnership have been from big 4 who have brought their culture over with them so be conscious of that.

Pros

Baringa has the best culture of any consulting firm I have worked for (out of 3). Leadership truly care about their people, and our current managing partner oozes this with every word and action that he says and does. Baringa recognises that the volume of travel and being away from home isn't something anyone really enjoys, and so it compensates employees on "out of town" projects both financially and with additional holidays. This is something I have never seen at any consultancy and one that sets Baringa apart and demonstrates how much they care about their people. Baringa has been the first consultancy to accept me for who I am, and I have watched its people do the same with many other new joiners. We strive hard not to simply hire in our own image and I feel we already have quite a diverse workforce, but never one to rest on our laurels we are still working hard to push the message of diversity across the company. Furthermore, Baringa is full of bright, passionate and smart people. We are not a corporate SI giant, and if you are tired of that life I would highly suggest Baringa is a step in the right direction to better work life balance, but just as interesting work.

Cons

There are few downsides I have seen to working at Baringa. As with any consultancy, you do have to travel, and you do have to occasionally do a role that doesn't fit your skillset, but you can't ever avoid that in consulting. My biggest downside at the moment is that we have grown so much in the last year our home office in London is getting rather full on Friday's when most people come in, but it's manageable and we've been acquiring other space in an nearby building to help this.

Pros

There are a number of positives in working a Baringa: - some genuinely interesting and challenging client work - a good awareness of work/life balance within the consulting space - some of the best parties/company events - some genuinely awesome colleagues

Cons

So, where is Baringa currently going wrong? - Geographic growth - the strategy to build successful businesses internationally for Baringa has to be a case book example for business schools on how not to do this. The current leadership has been remarkably poor at addressing these underperforming parts of the business and fixing the problems. - Diversity - Baringa needs to do so much more to embrace diversity in all it’s facets and not try and build a business where everyone is a clone of the current Senior Partners - there is lots of rhetoric in the firm about being 'diverse and building diversity' but the sad truth is Baringa only likes square pegs, so if you are a little bit round on the edges, it will be much much harder for you to develop your career. Baringa is losing so many great people because of this. - Compensation - Benefits are so-so - apart from the parties. To attract and keep great people Baringa needs to have a better overall package. - Leadership - Great leadership has high levels of self awareness, they recognise they are not perfect, they genuinely take on board feedback, they are receptive to constructive criticism. Even at Partner level I have heard that some Partners do not share their views due to a fear of not being seen to ‘tow the company line’. Mohamed Mansour understood all this when he helped crete Baringa - we could really do with some of that ethos again.