Avoid Toxic Charity - Anonymous employee Working Chance Limited Employee Review

Supportive team, flexible working, great people.

There were no cons for me.

The core values and cause were great. Loved the women we supported and worked with. A unique and powerful charity. Great step if you have a genuine interest in making Charity/Third Sector within the criminal justice sector your career. Developed professionally and had loads of opportunity to improve my skillset with relevant and interesting training. Fun team - MOST of whom were genuinely nice people and passionate about what they did. Massive improvement of overall comradery and running of the organisation from previous management who were an absolute mess that involved cliques, bullying and corruption. Good relationship with CEO who I worked closely with during various periods of transition. Felt supported by the CEO whenever I had an issue with my work or with a conflict that arose with a colleague. Opportunities for promotion were great while I was there - I felt like my career progression was on an upward trajectory for the first 3 years Work life balance improved due to the pandemic - this was by force. The culture for work life balance definitely wasn't there before. Not sure what it's like now but I had a mostly great experience with my work life balance, especially as I was coming back from mat leave. Fantastic location & office has recently been renovated

Poor management style - manager lacked training and conflict resolution skills were sparse (felt micro managed especially during the pandemic and having just had a baby) Lack of diversity across teams and this was problematic due to the demographic of women we supported and represented (there are currently no black Senior Management Team members; not sure about the board of Trustees and that needs to change.) A small team which can be an issue if that "close-knit, family feel" is not your vibe; also allows for petty issues that don't matter to become irrelevant fixations. In comparison, bigger organisations wouldn't have time for half of the silliness that small organisations such as this one tend to focus on and that's on internal issues not relevant to our work. Again, because it's a small organisation, career progression opportunities became less frequent to non existent. Superficial team building efforts - none of which genuinely improved team morale (in my experience) - in some cases, it felt very them (SMT) vs. us (colleagues)