I currently work at LateRooms and can honestly say it has recently become one of the worst places I’ve ever worked.
Laterooms quickly transformed following a change of leadership in the Service Management team last year, this has decimated an entire team due to a complete lack of leadership skills, and a refusal to listen to common sense and industry best practice.
This has caused undue pressure on numerous members of staff and as a result the team has been reduced to a shell of itself.
The issues have been compounded by a HR department that itself is suffering due to cuts and an extreme lack of personnel. Confidential issues raised with them are often acerbated by them in turn being directly raised with the persons in question, causing conflict in teams.
PA’s seem to rule the roost within the organisation, more concerned with managing events and getting involved in fund raising activities, they refuse to help IT support the senior management structure, leaving IT to contend with basic admin tasks such as managing the MD’s huge mailbox and calendar. They also refuse to engage in basic IT training meaning we have had to waste precious time supporting non incidents.
I’ll leave you with this anecdote….
Recently we closed AsiaRooms.com and diverted all of our sister sites traffic to the LateRooms website. This caused the laterooms website to go down causing a P1/major incident. The initial ‘big bang’ approach to move all traffic over was questioned by service management but senior service management decided they wanted to go ahead with it.
Following the P1, service management decided that we shouldn’t try this again until proper testing had taken place, the only way we should do this would be a fased approach. This was overruled by the MD of the company.
Sure enough the big bang approach managed to take the LateRooms site down again. Not content with 2 P1’s in the same day, the MD put pressure on the IT staff once again to switch all asiarooms traffic over to laterooms. Yep, you guessed it Another P1. They say that the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Well that’s the MD whos demanding we work like this. With this in mind, what hope do we have as a company?
