This was a really negative place to work. The work we were undertaking started out as a 3 month temporary contract, and then manifested in to a permanent role as the scope of the work required became clear to Concentrix and the client. With this, came amazing opportunities for Concentrix in employee retention, promotion, careers, development, and absolutely none of these opportunities were seized, due to their mismanagement.
The Client (can't speak to which company it is exactly) had a terrible attitude to how this work needed to be completed. They estimated it would be completed by Concentrix with 150 people, 1 month of training and 2 months of work. That was July 2020, Concentrix has lost about 70% of its starting workforce of 150, hired a bunch more in several batches, and the work is still not complete in September 2021. What was advertised as a "Data Entry" role quickly became something that involved confusing guidelines with conflicting documentation, processes that changed on a daily basis with no warning or justification, and a totally reactive approach to issues from both Concentrix and the client. This training that was provided by the client was also completely useless, and we as a cohort came in to production completing less than 30% of our work correctly. By the time the original 3 month contract had finished, due to the client shifting the goalposts on what was required of us, we had not put through a single piece of work to the standard they required, purely because they had such difficulty defining what that standard was. Our work was evaluated on a pass/fail basis by the client, but any discussions about the shortcomings of the process documentation provided to us by the client, quickly led to large-scale arguments, but ultimately it was the client that got the final say every time. This wasn't a major issue for us as employees, until an incentive system was introduced.
The incentive system was made to essentially incentivise people to do more work at a higher quality. The data used to feed this incentive system was extremely unreliable (and Concentrix knew this from the beginning), and there were so many external factors (Days off, complex items to work on, quality outcome challenges, administration errors, etc) that affected people's eligibility, that the management of the incentive payments ended up being a full-time job for the Team Leaders for the first half of each month. But none of this was ever fixed, and the same problems arose at the start of the next month, and the start of the next month. The unreliability of this data means that the people completing the work, had absolutely no idea how they were going in terms of throughput, quality, common errors, nothing. Team Leaders had to go "underground" to get accurate live data for their Team members to see people's progress and give useful feedback, coaching, etc. And this was after the reporting team was doubled from 1 to 2 people, all that info was being sent upwards in the command chain to managers, the client, etc, but never ever shared with the people doing the actual work.
There was very little interest from both Concentrix and the client on the integrity of the work. Concentrix just wanted to please the client, the client just wanted to meet their obligations. Calling in to question the integrity and purpose of the work we were actually doing was a totally foreign concept to anyone I discussed it with at either company. The same policy applied to promotions, usually awarded to those who kept quiet and got their work done, not those who strived to improve efficiencies and question inconsistencies. On multiple occasions, I applied for promotions for work I was already doing (mainly because no one else could on an interim basis, and Concentrix was always extremely slow to react when it came to needing to replace people, at one point having 4 of the 10 teams on the floor with no Team Leader), and did not receive the promotion. Many of my other colleagues were regarded by their peers as unquestionably the best candidate for a given role, and yet incredibly strange and inexplicable decisions were made for the eventual candidate.
There were multiple people (especially women) who made complaints about harassment from certain managers/leaders that were completely ignored by HR. Even just recommendations and ideas from female leader were ignored, then the exact same recommendation would be made by a male leader, and they were praised AND promoted. I'm saying this as a male who had the luxury of being listened to a lot of the time when I spoke, whilst women more qualified and experienced than me were disregarded.
Lastly, despite everything I've written above, the wage was probably the main reason people were leaving. Our client's competitors were setting up similiar projects and paying 20% more, and people were leaving Concentrix in droves for these opportunities. Even the original small group of people that were completing this work with the client were paid far more than us, which would be fine if their experience and expertise meant they were of higher value. However, the data we have from the pass/fail system that was in use showed the exact opposite, as we were completing our work with a 90%+ success rate, whilst the client was sending us back work that we had "failed", and we were successfully challenging this decision over 50% of the time. The discussion of a payrise started at the beginning of the project, and management would constantly say "we're working on it, we're fighting for it", but nothing ever changed, and people continued leaving en masse.
There's so much more I want to say, but better to just leave it to these main points. It's a company devoid of culture, moments of fun in the workplace were extremely few and far between, and primarily driven by our colleagues rather than management. The management structure is bloated and it means nothing gets done. The smallest of things need approval by multiple people who really just do not care, and/or do not have time. The pay is uncompetitive in the industry, and the path to success within the company involves selling your soul a little bit more at every new level up the ladder.
