Inefficient culture & burn-out - Group Manager bei RWS Group: Mitarbeiterbewertung

Daily Firefighting in localization program operations, which are unsustainably fast-paced and manual. You have a vicious circle where teams are stressed out from tasks, but are too busy to step back and figure out how to improve things. It was frustrating to see people resist change that was intended to help them. At least suggest something, instead of refusing help. Interacting with technical experts in Dev or other tech areas was an issue too. They were probably under-resourced and they would have to be chased a lot. I got the impression that we were inconveniencing them with a request, rather than them being there to support you. It was very difficult to ramp up operationally, when the tech feature requests were bottlenecked for months. We could have automated lots of production and QA tasks, if we just had more prompt support. It got to the point where my client decided to design their own solution instead and have us plug into it. Nobody else outside our program team seemed to notice or care about this lost opportunity. Poor project management discipline. When I joined, there was no handover, project documentation, meeting minutes, or client contracts that I could read up on. There is a culture of ad-hoc long meetings, long hours, and heavy email. +250 emails a day was normal. No standard like Prince2/Agile/PMP in place, so everyone handles things as they see fit. Employees didn't like the idea of writing instructions. The feedback was often "Oh you can call me, I'll tell you", but that isn't feasible either if that person leaves the company, or works in another timezone. It felt like we were teaching Business 101 at times: we had to explain professional communication or project best practices, or how to behave on business trips. Moravia is often a Brno graduate's first professional job, so they do not have prior knowledge of localization and need to be trained from scratch. Work life balance is non-existent for program directors and group managers in particular. If I worked long hours (usually 60h/week), program directors do even more. Having people still in the office or online at 9pm on Friday nights is a feature at Moravia, and not a bug. Even with teams in other time zones, long hours were necessary. I did everything I could to empower teams. However, the overall culture is one of risk avoidance, change-adverse, and run everything past the manager or director. I know this improves with experience, but like I said, you have to accept that you're going to have a less-seasoned resource pool in Brno, compared to Argentina or the USA offices. Conflict-adverse HR. Without going into details (and some exceptions), but they added to my stress levels whenever I had out-of-the-ordinary issues or questions. Distance between account teams and upper management. Not once was I ever asked to report on KPIs, data, or statuses to anyone, even though I was a leader on a big program. I haven't even touched on the client-facing aspects of the role, but you have to be very hands-on with that too. I found it very frustrating at Moravia. I was expecting a far more mature LSP in terms of resourcing, scalability, operations and technology, given that the company is 30 years old now. They still see themselves as small, fresh start-up in Brno, than a "grown-up" multimillion international company with lots of huge clients.