Toxic environment - Consultant ECORYS Employee Review

I am taking the time to write this in more detail, as I have too read the reviews before I accepted the offer. Some things proved to be quite different than the reviews mentioned at the time so this might help someone. The salary is indeed very low, and the salary range for the senior colleagues corresponds to the junior grades in other companies. You do have the list of objectives and you choose with your manager the objectives at the beginning of the year that, once accomplished should lead to your eventual promotion. In reality, some colleagues never get the chance to achieve their set objectives because the type of tasks and projects assigned to them is chosen by their manager, but not aligned with these objectives. I am including this because several older reviews mention that you do have a say in what projects you will work on. The truth is, most colleagues do not, though this is, to some extent, understandable, as the job needs to get done by someone. However, it also means that the job you actually do can be quite different than what was in your job description, or what was agreed during the interview. Another thing that could not be justified and should not be tolerated is the bullying that comes from the side of the managers. Ecorys tends to recruit people from the EU institutions (and yes, as someone mentioned, quite a lot of recruitees are underpaid females in junior positions), however, they recruit as directors people who often have years of experience in the institutions, but none or very little experience in managing people. Which should explain bad management, but can still be no excuse for the bullying. However, HR tends to only react when these accusations were charged by the higher-level employees towards the lower-level ones. And the real bullying comes from some of the directors, but to be fair, I do not think that the junior colleagues ever filed an official complaint so it might not be HR's fault. And if they did officially complain, there was no visible progress during my time at Ecorys. To be mentioned here is that there are open offices in the UK and Brussels so the bullying and the demeaning comments are often heard by the whole teams if not the entire offices. Yet, it was never addressed. Self-initiatives were not observed as something commendable, and most suggestions from me and my colleagues were turned down, often without argumentation. Colleagues were sometimes publicly mocked for making an effort, again in front of the colleagues. It was uncomfortable to witness it and I had a feeling that this type of behaviour is allowed, if not encouraged. The result of this kind of approach was that many new colleagues stopped suggesting new ideas within the first couple of months at work. All this leads to people resigning quite often. Never before have I worked for a company where so many people resigned in such a short time. For example, one team lost more than half team members over the course of less than half a year. And most resigned before previously securing a new job. That spoke volumes.