Booking.com

2.0

24 Mar 2018

Anonymous employee

Recommend

CEO approval

Business outlook

Pros

My fellow colleagues are great, its what keeps me going in. Our engineering function seems to have a real sense of community with a properly thought out and achievable career progression structure. Some of the management in engineering are great but sometimes fall victim to the constant changing priorities in the business. Pretty open working environment where people for the most part speak their mind - even if if we don't get listened to. Staff in the contact centre are actually treated like people, which is great. I've seen many places where they're just employee numbers to be moved about. Nice offices and in the centre of the city, some of the rooms are a bit rubbish to actually use due to rubbish furniture but most rooms have audio & video, a conference phone, writeable walls and whiteboard pens. Relatively open environment where everyone knows whats going on in the business - if we're ahead or behind. We have quarterly get togethers as as business to see its performance and we're given opportunity to ask hard hitting questions which our directors will answer. Free beer on a Fridays once a month if thats your kind of thing. We support local tech community meetups, I think we're hosting maybe 5 on a regular basis now and people keep adding more. For the majority it isn't really a place where you'll be working for more than 40 hours a week (but that depends on the area).

Cons

The product area in the business is completely broken. I can see that most people in that area of product are unhappy and stressed out, whether you are a UX Designer, Insight Analyst or Product Owner. This is mostly down to the constant crunch management style. If you are currently the one in focus you very much feel it. We never really celebrate success and as soon as we have a win, its straight onto the next fire we have to put out. Pointless meetings that have mandatory attendance - our community is massive now and they are often a waste of time. Conflicting targets and priorities, engineering might have some goals one quarter and product might have another. This not only causes internal conflict within the product teams themselves but conflict between teams. Its very hard to collaborate and push the BookingGo strategy when there is so much conflict in goals. Whilst i have a great relationship with my colleagues in my product team, as a community its becoming toxic. There isn't a "we're doing this for the company" vibe, its all "we're doing this to meet our own targets and get people off our back"' workplace. A lot of autonomy has been removed from the teams. You are often asked to do something and then asked again, and again, and again until you do it with no opportunity to discuss it. Management say they don't tell you what to do, but they handle things in such a way that it becomes next to impossible not to do it. Completely shifting goals - what is important in the business at this moment in time might be gazumped by something else within a matter of weeks. This means it makes it very difficult to actually deliver anything of value, or expected growth of certain teams doesn't happen. Some teams have lost out on backfils for people who have left because of those priority changes but are still expected to deliver those really stretching results. We focus way too much on short term wins instead of strategic long time opportunities. This is starting to change somewhat as we've broken our into ground transport - but the bread and butter of the business is short term rewards. I don't actually feel like i've delivered much value during my time in the business vs other places I have worked out. Seems to be a real variance in people who are stretched and people who aren't. I regular work 50 hour weeks with meetings booked in until 6pm, yet other areas in the business definitely aren't feeling this pressure.

Booking.com Response

Hi and thank you for your feedback it is genuinely appreciated. Whilst I am clearly disappointed by your rating and some of the things you have said, I have to say thank you for the consideration and thought that you have given this review, it really is useful and thought provoking feedback so thank you, really thank you. You cover a lot of issues here and I don't intend to respond point by point but I think I would like to reply more generally if that's ok. To your advice to us, we definitely do not want to be a business that burns people out, 100% not. We do want to be (and I'm sure we will be) a long standing colleague focussed business that delivers amazing product that changes the way customers travel. You will have heard me speak at many all colleague updates and I can assure you that as a Leadership Team we are committed to becoming a truly amazing place to work, if you doubt that please do note that it's a business level OKR for us and I suspect always will be. Having said that, we are learning as an LT and as an organisation and we still have lots to learn. Last year we didn't get the cascade of OKRs right and that did lead to some targets changing which I appreciate must have been confusing / disheartening. We are also transitioning from what has always been a top down organisation to one where we want teams to own their own ambitions and targets but this is a culture shift that takes time to adjust to. As a reminder we only fully restructured into a Product Group structure 18 months ago. The progress we have made has been awesome but we are still learning. I hope from some of the meetings and updates we've held over the last couple of weeks you can see the learning turning into action. I think it is also important to point out that we are a commercial, ecommerce business, part of the 3rd largest ecommerce business in the world that is highly profitable (a lot of tech companies aren't). We are a trading business and as such we have to react to trading conditions and that will always create some tension between "hitting the numbers" and achieving long term world changing goals. That's just the nature of what we do. If we don't keep the fly wheel turning, there will not be the investment available to achieve the huge ambition we have to transform our customer's experience. Finally with regards to too many meetings, you raise an interesting point that since you posted this review has created a lot of discussion a lot of it at LT level 👍. For what it's worth, in my opinion if at the end of a meeting you think "what was that all about" then we have failed. Having said that, communication and alignment is important and in an Agile world of stand ups and retrospectives there are a lot of "meetings" although I suspect that's not what you mean 😉. Watch this space but I would also say to anyone in our business if there is poor meeting practise happening let's call it out we all have a responsibility to help facilitate this change. Thanks again this has been one of the most thought provoking reviews we have had. I hope we can build on the amazing Pros that you identified. All the best Ryan

Some good but a lot very bad, we are constantly putting out fires - Anonymous employee Booking.com Employee Review

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