Genuinely felt like I was wasting my time all day every day.
If you have any career ambitions or want to develop, this isn't the place for you:
- No bonuses for most staff
- No corporate grades
- No formal promotion process
- Next to none objective setting.
Because there is no "reward" for working hard or trying to improve things and there is no real measurement for "poor" performance, it creates this strange apathetic mindset where nobody cares and nobody takes any initiative because it's not in anyone's interests to (and you cannot navigate through the bureaucracy anyway).
This is how the whole banks work, not just the UK office, so be warned.
Opaque decision making for promotions - people can become a head of department despite having no direct previous experience in that area or market sometimes ahead of other experienced candidates (this happened several times in 2024 alone).
The level of bureaucracy at the bank is astounding for the products they offer and the majority of the business occurring within the EU. It comes from a combination of people trying to protect their potentially obsolete roles or being exposed for their lack of work and having a complete lack of joined up thinking/leadership from Central/Group functions - there are literal teams and teams (sometimes they have almost identical names) all doing the same non-value adding exercises.
- The bank really suffers from favouritism (as shown with the opaque promotion decisions), particularly in the UK office where people who come from Group get parachuted into prominent roles in the UK and automatically have more holiday than UK contracted staff and get held to a different standard to other staff members
Diversity within SEB literally means "more women" and totally ignores any other aspect of DEI such as race, sexual orientation, socio-economic background etc.