Pros
The people - what's left of them.
Kontras
Civica should be seen as a cautionary tale of how an amazing workplace culture, built up through years of great leadership, can suddenly come crashing down. For well over two decades, Civica was a fantastic place to work, with a friendly, supportive culture, great people and a real passion for public sector customers. Senior managers were respected and they in turn treated employees with respect. Things took a sharp turn about two years ago, following a shake-up in the senior management team. A down-to-Earth, plain-speaking, customer-centric culture gave way to empty meaningless slogans like ‘GovTech Champion’ and ‘Winning Today’, which everyone is now expected to parrot to increasingly confused customers. On top of all this, endless ill-thought through restructures and large-scale redundancies have basically hollowed out the company and zapped morale for those who have kept their heads down and soldiered on. Civica used to have a genuinely open culture of communication with employees, with regular ENPS surveys, but this all ground to a halt. The prevailing management ethos has become increasingly masculine and ‘blokeish’, with nasty, degrading behaviour, which wouldn’t be out of place in a 1980s office, now a lot more commonplace.
