Reply reviews

Large amounts of company politics, and senior managers will shout and harshly criticise other colleagues. While Reply is made up of many different sub-companies, most if not all sub-companies share a competitive, highly political culture. Most of the work you will do at Reply is based on internal tasks like making sales presentations, writing reports, and hosting workshops. There is a very prevalent sales culture and all employees are expected to bend over backwards to cater to clients and manager needs. If you can avoid this company, I really would recommend you do so. It has negatively affected my mental health significantly. I would dread coming into work because I didn't want a senior manager to have a go at me or give their work to me. Working at Reply was a nightmare that still gives me intense anxiety.

The problem with working in Reply Holding (which are the shared service departments such as HR, Ops, Finance, etc) is that you are serving an ever growing number of Reply startups and acqusitions but your team does not grow in tandem to cater for them. Each of those companies have their own needs and requirements, each of them are growing or reducing in size and therefore office space / desks need to be adjusted accordingly. Imagine trying to manage the desk / floor plan in a shared office for 20+ companies by yourself, then multiply that across different offices. Each of those companies have partners who are after you for one reason or another: because they don't want to move, because they don't want to concede office space to a different Reply company, because they urgently need their own partner office. It's a constant game of politics and favours, you spend a lot of time negotiating between the partners to try and please everyone. That's just the tip of the iceberg, because on top of that new tasks will be sent to your inbox on a daily basis, each more urgent than the previous, it will keep piling up but you will not get the support you need and your requests won't be listened to. There is also a lot nepotism in Reply, you will notice that managers will say "well ___ asked for this" in a more urgent almost frightened tone, (typically it's a friend or confidant of the Rizzantes), and therefore that's suddenly something you should drop everything for.