The downs outweigh the ups - Key Account Manager Ground Control Employee Review

- My time at Ground Control started with the absolutely baffling interview process. During this I was left waiting in reception for half an hour and asked to help move some boxes into a room, before the interview even begun! I was asked back for an experience day where things got even stranger. I was left in the interview room on my own for 45 minutes where I genuinely think I was forgotten about. The same person came in 3 times and asked me the same questions, which I thought was some sort of test in itself as each time this person spoke to me as if we’d never met, even though she came in to speak to me within the course of an hour. After lunch I was told I would be then asked to do some work to see how I fit in with the team. Only I was left sat at someones desk and read through some paperwork, then just before leaving I was shown how you book holiday through their online system. I think this level of disorganisation carried on once I accepted the job. - Once working the induction process was non existent. I was not trained on any systems or shown anything, not even introduced to my other team members. It took me weeks to learn who was even part of my team. During the interview I was told how busy it would be, yet the first 4 days I was left reading the same paper work I had on my experience day and given absolutely nothing to do. This only changed as I went around looking for bits to do as 9-5 twiddling your thumbs is enough to drive you mad. The only way I learned things was asking my peers as and when I came across an issue and no proper training given as the Ground Control way of doing things. - This lack of an induction process showed just how badly it effected the business as there was virtually a revolving door of new joiners during my time at Ground Control. So many people joined and before their probation period had finished were let go. Quite often it felt like people were not given a fair chance or the training required to do the job before being shown the door. As someone new myself I was always very aware that I was both lucky to have identified how my clients liked to work and fortunately had some very good support from some of my peers. Others not so lucky were tossed aside and it felt like potentially good people were let go simply because they did not ask for help. I think quite often if someone is failing at their job then the business should be looking at why that is, are they not training them adequately, rather than just deciding the person was not right for the role. I think in my first 3 months I saw 4 people join and leave, which is more than I had seen in my previous jobs combined. - I found the “them vs us” attitude quite disturbing. I have never experienced anything like it before! I heard someone in the technical team when speaking about a sub contractor doing some work wrong use the phrase “that’s why he’s on the tools”. Contract managers are held in some god like esteem for some reason and heard them refer to the office staff as “pencil pushers” and “poindexters” on numerous occasions. As cliché as it sounds everyone is pulling in the same direction, yet at Ground Control there seems to be a feeling that there is a hierarchy that has to be adhered to. For me it made me quite uncomfortable when dealing with contract managers as there was a feeling that they felt above others in the business. This was not helped by the management who had this strange idea that office staff should spend more time speaking to the contract managers while they were on the road to stop them getting lonely. This seemed only to promote a constant hum in the office of people gossiping on the phone all day long and for my liking not doing as much productive work as they could have done. I would have been a millionaire if I had a pound for every time I heard the person sitting opposite me phone a contract manager to tell them how much work they had on. I often wondered what their work load would have been like had those calls not been made. Personally I was more interested with getting my work done and not being the 5 minutes of entertainment for a contract manager between their cigarette breaks. - Pay seemed to cause more problems than anything else. Without a clear pay scale there seemed to be endless problems around this. People were told not to discuss their pay amongst each other and even I was spoken to about this at one point. Having come from previous businesses where pay scales are laid out and benchmarking with competitors was common place I found it a little perplexing this was such an issue. It became clear that there was a massive difference between the top and bottom earners for those in the same role that it raised problems. Perhaps a more structured pay scale would help to eliminate that. Although with absolutely no career progression there itis difficult to see how this could happen. One of my main reasons for leaving was from the key account manager role there was only a move to senior key account management and that was it. By all accounts the pay increase was non existent with even some key account managers reported to earn more than senior key account mangers, it was confusing beyond belief. - The bonus system also needs to be looked at. The suggest 10-30% of salary bonus as advertised was not the case. Also the bonus I received, which I was reasonably happy with was also described as at the very top of what others in my role had and I should not expect to receive something similar again. It then transpired that 4 of my colleagues I spoke to had in fact got more, which seems unlikely I spoke to the only people who got more than me. Although I was happy with what I had it did not need the lies of saying it was one of the highest when it was not. Its those type of things that lead to unrest as no one likes to be lied to. Also never before had my end of year review for a bonus been put down to writing such a short character statement! Essentially my bonus came down to a piece of writing like a tweet! My time spent collecting feedback from so many different sources was totally wasted. Which led me to feel that higher management were rewarding their buddies rather than those who perhaps deserved it. - The day to day work I found easy to do, but often left a bit confused by the senior managements decisions to get involved. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to it. Often I found my direct manager unable to give any useful input into queries I had and spent much longer going to my peers for answers with no real understanding of who might have the knowledge to help or not. This also led to issues with certain clients where the very top management seemed to ignore, then other times for minor things did get involved. In all honesty I could not understand their logic behind what they did. I found the top management very difficult to read with often coming across that Ground Control was a family run business that had grown and other times wanted to act like the company was a huge business and run as such. It ended up being confusing on what approach they would take. One hand you had a managing director who would laugh and joke around with everything, then next minute is noting down who has been at lunch for over an hour. It felt like at times you were given free reign to do what you want with you clients, almost to the point that it felt like no one was keeping an eye on it. Then it would switch to such small things as to who goes on lunch when being micro managed. It was often very confusing. - Ground Control seemed to have a varied approach to the carrot and the stick. The fact they offered bonuses and put on these parties etc I think is something that should be celebrated and really pushed as a good thing. However it was often used as a tactic to browbeat people, there are constant threats that if you don’t do certain things you wont get a bonus, it will be taken away, you won’t get to attend events etc. It felt like it took something nice they were offering and really gave it a negative spin. I have children and it’s the approach I take with them! If you are naughty we take your sweets away and at Ground Control it felt like they were doing the same. Company wide threats I personally don’t think is the best way to get people to perform better. - My main gripe was the over inflation of the role and how they used this to discourage people from leaving. Make no mistake the key account manager role is a customer service admin role, no more, no less. And that isn’t a bad thing. But Ground Control constantly try and sell it like something much more and as a result I think they use that to try and keep people in the role as if they can’t do better. I think they should do more to encourage people to aim higher and do more, but the problem being if they do there is really nowhere to progress that within Ground Control. They want to hold onto people within the role, but don’t offer enough for good, career driven people to want to stay long term. - There is a real blame culture which seemed to go directly everything against what I was told during the interview process. I was constantly told that they understood mistakes were made but it was about resolving them and going above and beyond for the client. I was impressed with this and even praised how refreshing it must be to work for a business that allowed for this. In truth the part they missed out that is as soon as something goes wrong there is a real witch hunt to pin the blame on someone. It often felt to me that when a problem came up more time was spent trying to point the finger at someone rather than resolving the issue. Although I agree when working you need everyone to take a degree of accountability for what you do, but once someone was given that black mark of making a mistake then they were pretty much unable to shake that reputation. - The higher management seemed to rarely be around and there was always an air of mystery of what they were doing. I appreciate they may well have been out trying to win new business, when I made this point that it would be nice to know who the company was talking to and what work we were pitching for. I was told this wasn't possible due to confidentiality laws. Which seemed like nonsense to me as I had worked in much larger organisations who would have a much more open approach to who they were speaking to. Ground Control seem to have this idea that their employees are sat there with blinkers on only interested in their own client portfolio. Which for me isn't true, I'm interested and concerned with what the business as a whole is doing. This level of mystique and mystery around what the higher management were doing led me really to believe that actually they probably weren't out speaking to any new clients, least not many big note worthy ones. Ultimately as I raised this issue a few times that either a brief email or meeting even just once a month to cover new wins etc would be good to keep everyone in the loop and was spoken to by a few people and made to feel like I was being completely unreasonable. I think my suggestion was greeted with suspicion more than anything else and made me feel like I was poking my nose into something that wasn't my business. - One of the few conversations I had when the managing director when I joined he seemed strangely fixated on asking endless questions regarding one of my previous jobs as a well known bank. What I found most peculiar is it was a 12 month contract I had worked 13 years ago. I wouldn't have minded if it was the most impressive thing I had done, but I have worked at bigger companies since. It left me quite confused as to what they found important when employing people. - For such a technologically advanced company there was some quite frankly archaic things still done. Certain changes that had to be made were down to the approval of one person, who was often uncontactable by phone. It felt like a completely outdated approach for a company that has so many great pieces of technology at their finger tips. The most laughable part was often once you did contact this person by phone they would immediately agree to whatever change you wanted with out asking any questions, which left me feeling like spending days trying to contact them was pointless.