Personio in Madrid: Bulling & Sexism - Anonymous employee Personio Employee Review

2.0
Nov 8, 2019
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great CEO, intelligent and with a great vision and business strategy, He is trying to build a culture that is quite cool in Munich but that doesn't really transfer into the Madrid office. The only good thing about Personio in Madrid I'd say are the locations of the office in Castellana and the opportunity to have a direct impact on the growth of the company... as long as your colleagues let you do it.

Cons

Personio's Madrid office is an interesting one. I've never worked in a company so full of politics, gossips and backstabbing between colleagues. In this office, there are no friends, you cannot really trust anyone. The product team seem to believe they are above anyone else in the company so because of this they should be treated better, have better benefits and earn more. If you are a woman or you are earning more than them, you have a problem: this people will bully you, plot and gossip behind your back, making your life difficult until you are forced to leave. To be honest, too much time is wasted in gossiping and plotting instead of doing the actual work. No wonder why the new Payroll product they are trying to build is full of bugs and issues and customers seem to prefer the competition. During my time there, I felt I was back in High School rather than working in a fast paced tech startup. It seems more important to show off you are working long hours than factual numerical results. There is no team work, some people won't share their work and won't share all the important information needed for the team to succeed. These people seem to believe keeping some info for themselves will give them some sort of power and could make them look better in front of management. Under my perspective, these people are just full of insecurities and are immature. Because of the lack of trust culture they also work in, I want to believe all they are trying protecting their own job. I don't believe this is a place where a good candidate could grow and even try to have an impact. All of the above is blocking success and employee development, so I wouldn't recommend it if what you want is a place to stay for long, with a good business strategy and where you can have an impact. At least not in the Madrid office where 5 people resigned during the time I was there (less than a year); some of them due to a burnout and bullying.

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Personio Response
6y
Thank you very much for your review! We appreciate your positive feedback about our CEO and of course would like to comment on the personal challenges you have shared as well. We are putting a lot of passion and resources into our office in Madrid to create a strong culture and a great team. Part of this culture is transparency, you may remember the weekly All Team meetings where every department and as well the leadership team is sharing company updates, decisions and our vision. During daily business, we are also committed to a transparent work environment which is of course not always perfect and we do make mistakes but it’s important for us to learn from them. Teamspirit is one of our core values, and we totally agree that collaboration which is based on trust across teams is key to be successful as a company. We want to offer an appreciative environment and feel sorry that you had a bad experience working with us. Please feel free to share further examples of how we can improve our internal communication and collaboration directly with us (team-hr@personio.de or directly to me: martina.ruiss@personio.de). We wish you all the best for your future career and thank you again for your great effort while working at Personio. Best regards Martina

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1.0
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Smart collaborative colleagues at the lower IC levels.

Cons

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