Awful interview procedure. No respect for the candidate. My point of contact was Holly who blocked my email address. Highly unprofessional experience indeed. Please do not put yourself through it.
NA
nasko
The Chinese Sweatshop of Document Production
WL/RRD is a Chinese Sweatshop to a lot of law firms that don't want to pay a decent amount of money for an on-site team. You could also think of it as a Capitalist Pyramid Scheme, where you work hard but get nothing, and higher you climb, the more advice that you give, because you make more money, but you just have a bunch of useless meetings with the higher management and waste each other's time.
TL;DR - if you work too hard, you'll get punished by being given extra work but no substantial pay increase, and if you do the bare minimum (for the same money), you will be told to do better, even though in any case, you will receive the bare minimum. You will get some pay increases every year, but they will be less than the national inflation rate, so you will always end up getting paid less and less. The best thing that happened to me is to leave WL/RRD.
The two good things about working at WL/RRD (Williams Lea and R.R. Donnelley) are that you get to work remotely, and also that you get all of your bank holidays back as Annual Leave days and you use them whenever you want (that's awful for normal people, but luckily, no normal people work at this company, which is what allows WL/RRD to function wonderfully, at the expense of all its employees of course).
Actually, now that I think about it, the best part of working at WL/RRD is when you get to leave - to others, you seem like a refugee from North Korea, because you're always scared of all the procedures, the unnecessarily amount of spreadsheets that need to be filled in (manually... in 2026), and the trauma that you might be getting micro-managed. Once you free yourself from this cold jail that is WL/RRD, you will really appreciate any other workplace.
One really good thing about the company, which is NOT valid anymore, used to be that you would be safe in the company - this is because WL is the absolute bottom that you can fall down to, so they bragged about not firing any people, but they've started making people redundant because some law firms are realising how bad the service is, possibly borderle violating the Human Rights Act, so this is no longer a valid point - you are not safe here, as they've started failing people's probations, if they don't meet this impossible level of expertise - for the minimum wage.
DO NOT APPLY, unless you're a masochist, of course.
Micro-management is also extremely annoying. There are constant useless meetings at a higher-management level, and I am sure that the only reason why they're called "higher" management is that they believe in being managed by a higher power, because the "management" part of their job is not very efficiently done.
There is no prospect for success, unless you're a Yes-Man. The only times when you have a chance for a promotion are if you're blindly agreeing with the management (if you pretend to agree with them or if you have nothing going on in that little head), or everyone is so bad that you're just the least worst option.
The stress would start developing at the higher positions and would increase the lower you go, but I made sure for it to end with me, as our team will never benefit from any stress - they are overworked, underpaid, and feeling miserable as it is, so why expect more from them.
I still don't know why they're "higher" management, when they are simple middle managers that do their own little paperwork and have zero expertise outside of the field of "yapping around for a few hours a day to simulate work being done". I know that this seems like hard work to them, but it's just not directly helping the company.
Imagine this - remove the middle and higher management, and the company will continue functioning just fine. Remove the operators, though, and you're left with a bunch of people who give advice, go on calls, and send a bunch of emails left and right.
One of the biggest issues is that you are expected to NOT do your bare minimum, even though you're paid the minimum wage. That means that it's not their choice to pay you this little - they would've paid people less, but the law doesn't allow them to do so.
There are all these unnecessary processes that you have to follow when you're doing things, and it's just such a waste of time, and they don't like it whenever you say that it's not possible.
Some teams even have multiple clients that they work with, which means that you're absolutely miserable all day, as you can't tell them that you have a lot of work, because that specific client might not be busy.
The work environment is extremely stressful. The culture is toxic.
This is very similar to the North Korean regime, although I would say that a Chinese Sweatshop also perfectly explains the situation.
MA
Maya.
Once a highly respected British…
Once a highly respected British business outsourcing company servicing corporate finance and legal sectors, specialising in print, presentations design, document production, mailroom and front of house support, became a fading shadow of its former self following disastrous management over-reach in ambitions and acquisitions. Rescued by Advent Capital, broken down and recently resold to RR Donnelly, an American company, that now has on its hands a hopelessly fragmented, globally disjointed company, with local managers being extremely territorial, self-centered and afraid of thinking out of their comfort zones, standards and quality controls depend solely on individual goodwill, investment bank based document processing teams routinely reproduce and rebrand financial reports from competitors, overtime is rarely paid in full or on time, employees requesting payroll or HR assistance get footballed between India-based IT support and other faceless outsourced 'business partners' who excel at stating policies but are unable to provide practical solutions, employee pension fund management has changed hands 3 times in 3 years and employees approaching retirement find their pension pot has unexplainedly shrunk by enormous amounts and the average employee is kept in the dark about what is truly going on. If you have investments in Williams Lea, I recommend SELL, SELL, SELL. Like the British Titanic, Williams Lea is a broken and sinking ship that will soon be relegated to history.
