Maturing scale-up with an inspiring mission, great leaders, lots of motivated colleagues and an outstanding culture
Gut am Arbeitgeber finde ich
Management genuinely cares about teams and individuals to a degree I’ve rarely seen anywhere. Communication and transparency are absolutely outstanding.
Schlecht am Arbeitgeber finde ich
Some growing pains here and there – but nothing that I’m seriously concerned about for the long run.
Verbesserungsvorschläge
Make it more attractive for people to come to the office regularly, e.g. through a more physically pleasant environment and better equipment.
Other than that, keep doing what you’re doing – not everything is great yet, but the overall trajectory is highly promising.
Arbeitsatmosphäre
The company manages to strike the right balance between being a good-humored start-up and gradually moving towards a more professional scale-up. There’s always room for fun and games, but in certain situations, a higher degree of seriousness is needed and therefore requested by the company.
If there is one thing to criticize, it’s the fact that the company is organized in classic departments, leading to occasional knowledge silos and/or tunnel vision when it comes to goal setting and executing initiatives. There is a tendency to move away from this structure through the introduction of 3 company pillars (Go-to-Market, Customer Experience and People & Ops) that makes me feel positive about strong(er) cross-functional collaboration in the future.
Kommunikation
Communication is open and transparent. The founders provide their view on the macro and micro markets and share things like revenue (plan vs. actual), relevant new and churned customers etc. on an at least monthly basis. This requires a high degree of trust from management (especially the founders) and they’re willing to give that trust quite freely.
Kollegenzusammenhalt
While there are certainly people who aren’t fully pulling their weight and/or with a tendency towards a negative attitude and/or “me” instead of “we” focus, this is to be expected from a company that has grown to its current size. Instead, it’s rather impressive that DataGuard has dozens of highly motivated people across all departments who go out of their way to be supportive towards each other and together move forward with the company as one cohesive unit. I also can’t remember ever experiencing any backstabbing or anything of that kind as long as I’ve been here.
Work-Life-Balance
My personal definition of “work/life balance” is that for the couple of times I need it every now and again, my employer can accommodate for it with flexibility and without giving me a bad feeling. So far, this has been the case 100% of my time at DataGuard: When I needed to shift my work hours to the afternoon/evening for a couple of days for family reasons, my email request was answered within minutes not only with permission to do so, but with an earnest “let us know if we can support you any further”.
That being said: If your definition of “work/life balance” is that you’ll clock in at exactly 40 hours each week and you can leave your desk every day at 5pm sharp with all your todos being done 100%, you probably won’t be happy at DataGuard. But that’s not because anyone is forced to work long hours to be promoted or not be fired – it’s simply because there’s always more stuff to do than there is time (and people) to do it.
Vorgesetztenverhalten
All I’ve experienced so far was direct, open and honest communication about positive as well as negative topics. Management not only takes criticism seriously but also proactively asks about their behavior (“Was this too much? Did I come across rude?”). All of this applies to individual communication (1on1s etc.), work in groups and last but not least company-wide communication (e.g. in the weekly all-hands).
Interessante Aufgaben
The long and short of it is: You won’t get bored here and there’s always more than enough stuff to do. To a certain degree, you’re also in charge of your own faith: If there’s a topic that’s near and dear to your heart and you want to work on it, you can make room for it as long as your duties don’t suffer from it.
Gleichberechtigung
DataGuard is a highly diverse company with employees from several dozen origin countries. Some departments and teams are more diverse than others (e.g. Engineering is particularly diverse). So far, I’ve not witnessed any discrimination based on nationality.
With regards to gender equality, while people identifying as male are definitely the majority (both in the company as a whole as well as in management/leadership positions), there is no discrimination against non-male people that I’m aware of. Also, the company (under the helm of the Chief People Officer) is working hard to bring more women to DataGuard (e.g. through network events) and get them into management/leadership positions.
Umgang mit älteren Kollegen
By nature, a start-up/scale-up attracts more younger than older people. From what I can say from past and present, older colleagues are neither favored nor discriminated against – there is a genuine effort to hear different voices in discussions and there is no bias towards/against either the experience and wisdom older colleagues bring to the table, nor the radical thoughts of the younger people.
Arbeitsbedingungen
Aside from the 5th floor (where the community and all-hands space is), the Munich office is rather oldschool and unexciting.
Same goes for the IT equipment: There’s not much wrong with it per se, but a tech company could/should probably invest a bit more into a more frictionless and modern experience. Prominent example: The headphones the company provides aren't noise-cancelled and (at best) average quality => not ideal for company that's call-heavy with customers and colleagues.
There’s a limited number of meeting rooms for collaborative work, but no single person phone booths or similar to have sensitive and/or longer calls.
Location of the office is rather decent – easy to reach using all kinds of public transport and with quite a bunch of affordable and good quality lunch options close by.
The company has a Home Office policy in place that mandates 40% office presence (although I'm not aware of managers executing this to the letter as long as people perform well). While I think regular physical presence is a good thing, I'd much rather have it encouraged through a pleasant office environment with good equipment than a policy.
Umwelt-/Sozialbewusstsein
The office has the typical bins for waste separation – sadly not all colleagues use these as intended.
Every employee gets their RYDES account charged monthly to encourage the use of public transport. The RYDES app shows an individual sustainability report as well as a company-wide report. Also, for company travel, using trains rather than cars or flights is encouraged through a travel policy.
Regarding social contributions, DataGuard regularly participates in fundraising activities in Germany as well as abroad.
Gehalt/Sozialleistungen
Personally, I can’t complain at all: I’m fairly compensated for the work that I do and the role that I have.
The topic of compensation/salary changes has been proactively addressed by my manager so far in the half-yearly review cycles.
Karriere/Weiterbildung
The company has clear career paths, which after the initial levels splits into expert and management paths. A “Level Up” program has recently been established to mentor potential future experts and managers. Also, at least in our department, people have been promoted based on merit rather than plain years of experience => great!
Each employee has a generous 1,500 EUR development budget and an agreed development plan with their manager. As it should be, responsibility to actually use the budget and follow through with the development plan lies with the individual.