Pros
The pay is OK, falling behind industry/Talllinn average, though.
Cons
The owners of the company (a venture capitalist firm) are in it for a quick buck - the plan is short-sighted on purpose - invest money, make cut-backs - most from employee welfare, show "profits", sell the company. The management of the company is incompetent and biased, the messaging is conflicted. The incompetence of the management is seen in almost every decision made - from outsourcing phone agent (and other) jobs to more expensive countries (rumors said the reasons for the move involved some of the management having a personal interest in the companies outsourced to) to freezing payrises and bonuses the same year due to cutbacks. The inability to make a decision and stick to it is almost a daily issue - changes are made and reverted back to original state regularly, causing conflict and frustration for employees tired of the nervous back-and-forth. Professional growth in the Tallinn office is limited to jobs revolving around the phone agent job - the lead agent position is the maximum possible for many, one step higher in the ladder than the entry level phone agent position. To go higher than the position, one will most likely need to be included in the inner circle of the important people or get very lucky with timing. Hard work is usually not rewarded with promotion or recognition, but just more work. Speaking up in the company or standing your ground is frowned upon, secretly - if an employee declines a help "request" for any reason, any career possibilities are immediately severely harmed, but in secret - making sure that the employee is kept on board, stuck in their current position but without any progress possible due to the vindictive personalities of some of the management in the company. There is a distinct bias within the company - most of the management is in Norway, meaning that Norwegian employees are often treated better than anyone else with seemingly the full range of job positions within the company available to them. Tallinn employees are kept where they belong – at entry positions or doing menial tasks – job opportunities in other offices around the world aren’t ever mentioned by HR in the Tallinn offices. It is even more extreme than this in reality – some supporting role employees in Tallinn are actively kept in the dark as to not accidentally learn and endanger the job of the Norwegian employee they support. Another con – phone agents in Norway, doing the exact same work, in lesser quantities (due to much more employee friendly laws in Norway) get paid 3-4 times more than the Tallinn office employees. Additonally, important events that used to be the norm and helped keep the morale up, such as the summer days event, are now cancelled for the Tallinn office - meanwhile, Norwegian hurtigruten employees fly first class to India for workshops. The company is a Kafkaesque absurdity, where things are done for the sake of doing things, where failing upwards beyond competence is standard and where corporate BS has reached intolerable levels (fun fact: employee desktop backgrounds have been changed to the company mission statements, such as „WE CARE“, without an option for the employee to change them), where promises are made to be broken and where the will to grow professionally is aggressively smothered. A while ago, I would have recommended the company to someone looking for a stable income. Today, I would not recommend it to anyone. Stay away, you’re worth more.
