VALD Culture FAQ

Pros

Like any scale up there are always new projects and you feel as though you are part of the exciting growth of the company. There is food and coffee daily (salary sacrifice), gym, access to physiotherapy and massage at discounted rate.

Cons

If you have a life outside of work you won't fit in. - Overtime is the norm including weekend and holidays. Make sure you answer your email outside of hours! - Staff turnover is very high. You would be lucky to last past 6 months due to being fired with no warning or wanting to get the hell out. - Middle management couldn't have enough umbrellas to protect their teams. The sun rarely shines. - There is no HR or professional development. Only legal to manage all the fair work claims. - Women are objectified and minority groups mocked. - Direction constantly changes with various side projects and unrealistic deadlines. - The founders want to make the company as profitable as possible through any means necessary and that does not include a good culture or a robust team.

Advice to Management

Any advice that doesn't align with their mentality is swiftly kicked to the kerb. Don't say you don't talk about competitors but then constantly chase them.

Pros

- I worked with some great people who are very good at their jobs. There are wonderful people scattered across the company too. - Breakfast, lunch and coffee made each day by in-house chefs and a barista.

Cons

- Management is extremely temperamental. You're the cool cat until one day, you're not, and the shift in attitude from management when they decide they don't like you anymore is so obvious that it's comical. This is especially true in particular departments. - I had to very quickly learn how to play "the game". VALD's the place to be if you love internal politics. Just about every day there would be some kind of drama. - I should also mention the rampant sexism that starts at the top and trickles all the way down. Very much an Old Boys vibe to the place. No thanks. I watched a significant number of women leave VALD during the time I was there, often for reasons related to this. I also received numerous inappropriate comments from various members of management, especially the CEO. There's no one to complain to because the "HR department" is actually just a hiring manager. - They say that they have a culture of not counting hours. This is just a roundabout way of saying that you're often going to be working overtime for no extra remuneration. To compound this, you won't even be acknowledged for the extra work you do. It's just expected. And it doesn't work both ways - if you leave even a minute before 5pm for whatever reason, you have eyes watching your back all the way out the door, and you'll hear about it the next day. - Micromanagement is a serious issue at VALD. You're treated like a child in how you organise, manage and complete any given task. This attitude towards employees ties into my previous point about being watched until 5pm - there's just no autonomy. Every week you need to fill out a very detailed report on all the tasks you have done/are doing/are planning to do. If you haven't included every minute detail you'll be pulled up on it when the CEO goes through it on the weekend. It's seriously overkill and a massive waste of time. We were even advised to block out upwards of an hour each Friday to complete the report to the level of detail requested by the CEO. The irony of course being that this in itself then becomes a task worthy of being put into the report - I never did this because I'm not sure the humour would have been appreciated. - Following on from this, things always inexplicably change at the last minute. You can spend weeks on a project, go through all the correct approval procedures, have everything signed off by the right people, and then have the final product entirely scrapped on a whim. It's incredibly disheartening when this happens, for obvious reasons, and especially because you did everything right. - There are no career progression opportunities, at least where I was, but I suspect this is mostly true across the company. This was ultimately the final straw for me, so I'll elaborate: I frequently asked to pick up more responsibilities in the direction I wanted to progress my career, and was always blocked by management. I don't believe this was due to poor performance, as my head of department always had positive feedback for me. I believe it's because I was doing a number of things that were not really within my job description and management didn't want to have to find someone else to do them. Management often says that job titles don't matter - which is easy to say as a CEO, CSO, etc. I think they say this so that they can pile on random tasks and responsibilities that aren't in your job description and you can't really argue - because apparently your role doesn't mean anything. Conveniently, this is also a pretty effective way of blocking promotions. After having been prevented from picking up more responsibilities, I was basically doing tasks just to fill out my weekly report for the CEO. I did not feel valued at all outside my immediate team, I wasn't learning, and I certainly wasn't enjoying myself. So I quit.

Advice to Management

Honestly, most of the issues at VALD stem from the CEO's attitudes. VALD isn't a start-up anymore and he needs to stop treating it like one and expecting his employees to treat it like one. In saying that, there are other serious issues across the company, such as the sexism I mentioned, which need to be addressed. It's so disappointing to see these attitudes anywhere and anytime, but especially in Brisbane in 2022. It's a shame, because the technology they're creating makes a genuine difference. But people will keep moving through VALD like it's a sieve unless they shake up the culture ASAP.