Capital One

Modern facilities, clean and well-kept.

Nearly everything after the initial 3-month period

I think management should do away with the cross-calibration performance review system. The employee is not allowed to represent their own performance in this system, so if their manager is weak at articulating what they have done, they will ultimately suffer.

Apart from this, the performance review culture actually encourages employees to come up with nonsensical ideas that waste money, such as decorating rooms as jungles and ski resorts. So, in effect, you have a culture of bad ideas being rewarded. You can easily see this by the lack of technological competition offered on the Capital One website compared to their competitors.

On the whole, a lot of good ideas that could potentially benefit the business are shelved because of the risk-averse culture, which totally goes against the "dare to be the best" internal slogan.

There seems to be a really unhealthy focus on doing things that aren't actually related to your role. This goes under the pretense that employees have to go the extra mile outside of their role, even if that extra mile has nothing to do with benefiting the business itself, which in itself is bizarre.

The vast majority of management have held high roles for a number of years, whilst the many at low levels are ushered along with concepts that waste their time and do not help them in their day-to-day work.

You will find a lot of employees who have stayed with Capital One since leaving university. The ones that come from other businesses and try to share their concepts and ideas are usually frowned upon for not doing things in the “Capital One Way”.

There is a lot of talk of work-life balance, but I didn't experience a fair balance. The work-life balance seems to be for the folks that have worked at Capital One for years and have managed to get flexi-weeks. Everyone else has to put up and shut up.

Overall, I think the general feeling in the place is that this was a once great company to work for when first set up in the UK, but things have changed.