Insecure leaders, extremely toxic work environment, high employee turnover, poor and mediocre company culture - Anonymous employee AMIRES Employee Review

The company is run by a Czech clique composed by family members and friends. This create a toxic work environment where certain employees receive special treatment and are not held to rules that apply to everyone else, and given opportunities not because of their abilities. If you part of the clique, you are promoted, coached, supported and encouraged. If you are not part of the clique, you are excluded and left out of the loop. Management likes to be surrounded themselves with team members who don’t question or challenge them and rewarding those who agree with their line of thinking. This led to disruptions on the team and damaging side effects, such as the departure of many potential talented employees. As a consequence, the company had an incredible high employee’s turnover in the last months and struggle to find decent workers to fill in the vacant positions. Promotions and evaluations are based exclusively on subjective and personal feelings, and not on objective evaluation based on merits, results and potentialities. Weird, unfair, and irrational behavior to promote employees after three or six months of work in the company without delivering any results and, in some cases, without having the right skills and attitude for the role. Performance evaluation are set up each three months. If you are part of the clique, the discussion is light and easy-going. If you are not, it is abrasive and rude. There are no metrics to evaluate workers. Everything is based on subjective and personal feelings. Performances are based only at individual level and there is not performance evaluation at team level. Company culture is Czech, NOT European. Czechs are treated much better than foreigners in term of salaries, conditions and career development. For the job you need only English but if you do not speak Czech, you are out of the loop and excluded from important information, discussion and meetings. In reality, the official company language is Czech, not English. This is definitively not an open minded and foreigner’s friendly company. Even if small, the company is highly hierarchic and structured in block of silos: programme managers VS project managers, favorite VS non favorites, Czechs VS foreigners. Leadership style is command and control and uses a strictly top-down approach, which it is out-of-date and inappropriate for a knowledge-based company. Employees do not have any independence for their activities and they must simply obey to the management orders, rules and procedures, which are applied differently between favorites and non-favorites employees. No space for creativity and real innovation. Management uses the divide and conquer approach with employees, making regular groundlessness and non-sense comparison between employees. Salaries are in line or slightly higher of the Czech job market but other incentives are poor: no meal vouchers, no Multisport, 3 sick days and only 20 days off of holiday per year. Company provides a phone with a sim card which it is good. Overall poor benefits package for employees in comparison to other companies in Prague and Czech Republic.