Urbis Reviews

In economic downturn URBIS thinks it can mistreat employees and that they will tolerate the abuse and bullying rather than take their chances on the market. Management forces employees to compete against each other as if they are gladiators. The result is that the alpha bullies win and the more talented or quiet achievers are crushed. The vicious dross is left behind. This place is so bad that there are immature graduates managing projects and inexperienced thirty-something’s promoted to Management and Associate Director levels. Management hide behind emails, charge their time to your job without doing any work, constantly make you feel insecure because you haven't reached the billability target and expect you to do project work and business development in your own personal time. Leadership tends to be by people who were in the right place at the right time, those left behind after the talented staff quit. You bust your gut for nothing and you won't see any reward in terms of recognition, security or promotion. May as well be in an 18th century coal mine for all the appreciation and job satisfaction at URBIS. It's a bizarre world at URBIS. Bad people with personality disorders are promoted to management roles and inflict their insanity on everyone they can. Their mission is to make your life as chaotic and stressful as possible. Short sighted retrenchment of talented staff (disposable factory workers) over the past few years has led to skills shortages. Only those that suck up to Management and back-stab their colleagues get promoted to Associate Directors positions. Biggest problem is that they hired a lot of people a few years ago as part of their world domination plan, but can’t find enough work. So there is a ridiculous amount of pressure on employees who have no control over it to keep their utilization up. This of course leads to fabricating timesheets to keep the bean counters/managers happy. These same managers are being paid ludicrously high wages to peddle corporate nonsense and keep the pressure on technical and design staff to keep billing. All they seem to do is to go through redundancies while keeping their bloated management structure. Thus people with a strategic brain and some vision don't last long, it goes against the task-orientated, plodder's culture. Bullying and disrespectful behavior is the norm. It’s also worth noting that since the acquisition of TRACT, URBIS has demonstrated a complete inability to maintain a previously well established client base.

Unreasonable amount of overtime expected, so it’s not family friendly and therefore contributing to pay disparity and unequal opportunities for women. Actively discouraged to talk to others about salaries. Expressed by a senior leader that “overtime is expected to succeed here”. Churn and burn culture. Staff welfare not a priority - just focused on bottom line. Difficult to take leave during busy periods. Bad for work-life-balance.