Good and bad at the same time
Gut am Arbeitgeber finde ich
Colleagues, home office equipment, superiors, good product and interesting tasks, great company events
Schlecht am Arbeitgeber finde ich
Employee retention, some lack of fairness, senseless top-down decisions/tasks that bring more work than benefit
Verbesserungsvorschläge
Listen to us and our wishes/complaints, invest more into keeping loyal employees, trust your VPs and Heads, and please get rid off some micromanagement that still remains
Arbeitsatmosphäre
Depending on your superior, you do get valuable feedback from time to time plus in regular feedback talks. Unfortunately, fairness and trust are a problem which is a thing you can see from top to bottom. Within a department, the trust is great and you have a lot of freedom. Heads and team leads trust their team members. On the other side, the Upper Management does not seem to always trust their lower management, including Heads and even VPs in making decision. Although it has gotten better, fairness regarding salary is also a problem, especially when it comes to loyal long-term employees.
Kommunikation
Management communicates financial figures very openly, which is great. The reasons behind decisions are not always communicated well enough. Cross-departmental communication is often extremely bad and chaotic, where departments are not aligned.
Kollegenzusammenhalt
Colleagues are the best thing about Xentral and the reason why many people stay here. You never let anyone down and there's a great atmosphere. There are never any conflicts.
Work-Life-Balance
It depends on you and your department / team. Generally we do have to work between 9 to 5. If you need to start later, go earlier or have a doctor's appointment, you won't have any issues.
Overtime is appreciated, but not paid. Whether and how much overtime you work depends on your position, the pressure you are under and yourself. If you can cope with bad numbers and the fact you will never get everything done, you can do the job in 8 hours without overtime. Some colleagues are under so much pressure, that the amount of overtime is unhealthy - but this is your own responsibility. We also had and have more work than time/capacity.
Vorgesetztenverhalten
All leads are super friendly and understanding. Your direct lead helps you as much as possible. The indirect leads, Upper Management, unfortunately sometimes sets unrealistic or pointless goals, just to have some KPI look great, even though we are drowning in work. Decisions are often not understandable.
Interessante Aufgaben
Xentral is fast-pace with a lot of changes. There are hardly any routines and always interesting tasks or projects. I have never been bored in the past years.
Arbeitsbedingungen
Home Office equipment is pretty good. You usually receive a new MacBook. Also, there is a decent home office budget to purchase exactly the kind of monitor, desk and chair that you'd like - or whatever else you need.
Unfortunately, equipment-wise our offices are not as good. Even though we do have heigh-adjustable desks in some offices, there is nothing but a mediocre monitor. No chargers or docking stations, so you have to bring everything from home (except for a HDMI cable :-)). Chairs are okay.
Other than that, the offices are usually central, nice and clean with good coffee and free water + soft drinks.
Umwelt-/Sozialbewusstsein
Not much done here, but in Augsburg there is Tupperware available for your lunches to reduce waste as well as a water fountain to replace buying bottled water.
Gehalt/Sozialleistungen
Overall okay, but not great. If you've just started with the company, you're probably better off than someone who has been with the company for longer. Salaries are not always fair and do not always match responsibility, but are paid on-time each month. If you're doing a good job, you can expect regular salary increases, even though they come too late when switching positions or responsibilites.
There are no bonuses (incl. Christmas or vacation bonuses). Overtimes is not compensated. Everyone I know has 30 vacation days, expect for us at Xentral (we have 28) - that's a bummer.
There are some other benefits like a company pension plan (which is not worth it for everybody), bike leasing, corporate benefits (discounts), yoga, free drinks in the offices, and so on. Amazing are the company events and regular department offsites.
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Xentral is overall a decent employee, but we definitely have many employees who will leave at some point, because too many things are just not right. Depending on what you're looking for and which kind of employees you had to deal with previously, you might be super happy here and stay for a while. Or you won't. Unfortunately, we lost a lot of good coworkers over the years - many of these resignations could have been prevented.
Karriere/Weiterbildung
You own your career Xentral. If you do a great job, you can definitely make it and even switch to other departments if you'd like. Money-wise you'd probably be better off switching jobs/companies after a couple of years, but that's the same everywhere.
Gleichberechtigung
Umgang mit älteren Kollegen
Arbeitgeber-Kommentar
Hi,
thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed review!
It is great to read, that you like your colleagues, the product and our events. :)
If the reasons behind decisions are unclear, I would like to encourage you to speak up. Our management is always open to answer questions, be it in the all-hands directly, in the roundtables or just with a ping via Slack.
Regarding the environment section, for sure, there´s always more that can be done! We are contributing to our environmental responsibility for example by working remotely and not equipping both, home offices and our hubs with everything twice and team events where our Xentraleers have collected trash.
Best,
Sophia