Worst company to work for - Content Producer NeoMam Studios Employee Review

1.0
5 Dec 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Location was good. I was fortunate enough to meet some great people working here (all of whom have now left)

Cons

This is a destructive environment that has been detrimental to colleagues and my own career. The culture is horrendous, the managers (when present - which was rare) used bullying tactics to get work done. There were huge periods of time where no work was allocated, yet we were made to sit in the office and not allowed to do further reading, studying, etc. When work was given impossible deadlines were set. The quality of work produced suffered because of this. There are unethical practices which, if learned by graduates and employees, will be detrimental to their attitudes and expectations in further roles.

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NeoMam Studios Response
9y
I am sorry you didn't enjoy your time at NeoMam which based on your profile I think ended in 2015. As someone who worked during this period, I can agree that it was certainly a hard time and stressful for everyone. Since then we have made some changes. Now we use the EOS system ( see point 5 - http://neomam.com/blog/difficult-agency-decisions/) which means everyone in the team has ownership over one number that supports the agency as a whole. Rather than rely on managers to allocate work, each team member is looking forward to how they can make improvements and improve their number so the agency as a whole can grow. The downside to this is there is always something to be done, and if new potential employees are reading this, then we don't get time to brush up on our Spanish or read the latest Harry Potter during worktime. On the plus side, employees become masters at valuable career skills such as time management, delegation, outsourcing and working efficiently in a team. My goal is that every employee when they leave NeoMam has the real world business skills to set up their own business one day.

Explore other reviews about NeoMam Studios

1.0
27 Dec 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

They pay on time, which is a rarity and much appreciated.

Cons

I had an extremely negative experience freelancing for Neomam. I'm convinced that the company purposely writes vague briefs to trick freelancers into doing extra work. As a result, compensation is low. If you decide to freelance here, know that you'll be asked to make unrealistic changes and additions to projects. To make matters worse, requested changes are often contradictory and sometimes not even possible.

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NeoMam Studios Response
3y
I appreciate you taking the time to leave this review. We need feedback to improve how we work. And I'm sorry you felt we were manipulating the briefs to get you to work extra and that your hard work wasn't compensated accordingly. It is not unusual for briefs to change when we are working on the production of the content as sometimes what we hoped we would do doesn't match up with what we can in fact do. This requires us to adjust briefs and make changes on the fly, but budgets get adjusted too when these changes get signed off to ensure any freelancer working on the project won't need to absorb extra work without extra pay. Since you left your review, we have improved our briefing process to ensure every step is thoroughly tested and planned out. We have also allocated extra days to the different briefing stages to give time to every team lead to add as many notes, examples and wireframes as needed, depending on the complexity of the project. In addition to this, we have also adjusted our budgets for freelance specialists, increasing the pay rate across the board. Lastly, we have ironed out the internal testing and feedback stage to avoid multiple rounds of feedback, and we have built a process to bring edits in-house in specific cases not to overload freelance specialists when the edits needed are too many. We wish you best of luck in the future.
5.0
5 Feb 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

I've been freelancing as a copywriter with NeoMam on and off since last summer, but more regularly since November when I was made redundant from my full-time job. It's no exaggeration to say that this work has changed my life and saved me from financial meltdown when hard times hit. I've been doing freelance work in my spare time for a couple of years and mostly been paid peanuts, whereas NeoMam's pay makes me feel like what I'm doing is actually valued. They always pay on time and I've never had any problems in this regard, which is equally rare in the freelancing world. The projects are always interesting concepts that I enjoy researching and writing about and I've learned a lot both about the subjects and the process of creating powerful and insightful infographics through this work. Best of all, everyone I've dealt with is lovely, helpful, constructive in their advice and it's a pleasure to be a part of their organisation.

Cons

The only thing I could consider a downside is that after my first piece last summer, there wasn't any other work for a few months, but that's the nature of freelance work, especially when you're a new member of the team and they're still working out what your strengths are. That's a downside to every freelance job, so not a reflection on NeoMam.

7
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NeoMam Studios Response
8y
Thank you for taking the time to share your experience and your feedback. I'm very happy to read that the work means so much to you, we are very lucky to have you on our team. We are working on a more transparent way of sharing upcoming projects with freelance team members to help us set realistic expectations in terms of workload. Thank you for bringing that to our attention. It's brilliant to learn that you have enjoyed learning about all the different topics you've had to researched over this past year! One of our values is that we are curious about what we don't know and this is another example of team members living those values on a regular basis. Thanks again for your feedback!
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