Control Risks reviews about "pay"

Pay very low compared to average in the field. No room for improvement or steady pay increases or promotions. Extremely high turnover of bright people as they do not care about them.

The job can sometimes be risky with too much travel to volatile environments in conflict prone areas of the world

Low pay, compensation, benefits and promotion

Senior management is still peppered with the "old boys" of the company's dying past as the private sector version of an officer's club. Though they will fall in numbers as the years pass, the few that remain are in senior roles where they appear immovable. Their disconnect from the more dynamic, ambitious, overworked and underpaid, and less clubbable employees is frustrating at best. While the pay is slightly below market, it is tolerable. What is less tolerable is that the pay is not commensurate with the workload or the toll that the work takes since it is highly stressful. This will not likely be resolved any time soon. The final con is the sheer level of bureaucracy and administration. Even the most determined and well meaning employee, a zealot, a fanatic, would give up at the futility of achieving even the smallest amount of change. On the plus side, they know it and hopefully they will do something about it.

The company promotes itself internally as putting its people first and ensuring a good work-life balance. However, in reality the company is obsessed first and foremost with its budgets and finances and as a result, many teams have limited resources and employees often have to work long hours and weekends to ensure projects and tasks are complete. Personal development opportunities are also often sidelined to ensure work is completed. While in a busy corporate environment it is expected to put in longer hours from time to time, this has largely become the norm at Control Risks. On top of this, the company has a reputation for paying well below market rates. Collectively, these challenges are reflected by a relatively high turnover of staff, especially at junior levels. The company, however, does not care about this high turnover of junior resources as it knows it operates within a highly competitive market where it will be able to quickly rehire new people. In addition, there is a lack of creativity and dynamism at senior management levels with most senior leaders have been with the company for at least 7-10 years, if not longer. Supposedly 'new appointments' are often just internal reshuffles. As a result, the company's culture and attitude towards its people does not change. With Control Risks having a presence in a large number of countries and regions across the world this is often promoted as meaning there are lots of travel opportunities. However, these are often limited to particular people.

- No investment in employee's professional development. For the Business Intelligence practice, research and writing are pretty much the only hard skills you have as a researcher. They might argue OSINT skills, but it's largely basic surface web research and is not transferrable to actual OSINT roles. - Fixation on billable man-hours, narrowly defined as any work tagged to a project. 1) The high KPI on this makes it virtually impossible for a junior employee to spend time on personal development, though there's not much resource on that, either. 2) There are non-billable hours that are still essential to winning billable projects, such as proposal writing and scoping; however, it is perplexing that the management has decided that these are not part of productive hours. As a result, sloppy proposals, underestimation of project price and tight timeline are common, and the directors would leave it to the project team to deliver anyway. - Stagnant if not declining industry, with declining pool of clients and project value. As such, the most common way companies gain advantage is to undercut price or promise faster turnover. There's a limit to how fast the project team could realistically complete a project without either sacrificing quality or work overtime every single time. Any feedback on this has fallen on deaf ears. - Fixation on revenue means little to no effort on employee welfare to retain them. Systemic issue such as described above is the source of dissatisfaction, brain drain and poor morale, and this couldn't be offset by random wellness sessions instigated by HR. - No transparency from leadership, even on the most basic things like tracking our own monthly KPIs. Salary discussion is actively discouraged. No, it is a good practice to minimise information asymmetry and ensure fair pay and to prohibit that just worsens your reputation. - Compensate your employees accordingly. So many are offered bottom of the pay range despite their track record showing otherwise. Company is only willing to bump up compensation when they're threatening to leave. This shows you have the budget all along, but aren't willing to reward them if they had stayed. Why is that? Also, bonus is really low. - No clear career progression, which has been largely based on tenure. I'm beating the dead horse here, but I still think it's necessary to say that having mostly Caucasian leadership regardless of the office location (even Asia) despite having locals as the majority of mid- to junior-level employees indicates a lack of willingness to localise the practice at the very least. As I have said, there are so many highly, and even over-, qualified people at the lower levels.