Pluspunten
The “front line” workers are some of the best people I have worked with, the only reason I have stayed at this company for this long. Most are dedicated, smart, hard working, and a pleasure to work with. In the earlier days, the culture was much more fun and collaborative, even with the intense work and the long nights. This changed when investors came on board and the company began emphasizing sales and expanding the client service teams over everything and everyone else.
Minpunten
If you’re not a VP or above and/or in a client service team, you will likely be overworked and under appreciated if you are a salaried employee. While a compliment and an occasional little gift once in awhile are appreciated, the company lacks some of the bigger acts of appreciating employees like proper compensation for the workload you deal with, trying to improve work-life balance, and respecting people even when projects aren’t going well. Because of the bare minimum of staff resources the company chooses to implement, many employees are overworked and burnt out with relentless schedules that don’t allow for much flexibility. The company’s treatment of you is inversely proportional to how much work you actually do to execute projects (the less hands on you are with the work, the better you get treated). I’ve heard before that some folks are to be treated like “talent” on a production where they get what they want and everyone else has to deal with it. The workplace is at times toxic, hostile, and unprofessional. The people at the top of the client service teams don’t feel the need to be respectful to lower level employees unless it suits their needs. And management reinforces this by always listening to their side of the story first and taking actions to soothe their egos at the expense of the workers. I understand the pressure they face to bring in projects and revenue, but that doesn’t give them a pass to be disrespectful and also blame all others except their own teams (even if their team had a role) if they don’t succeed in winning or executing a project. Too often instead of critiquing ideas, leadership likes to attack the person instead. Communication and coordination is rather lacking. The company is fractured with teams overlapping in their products, teams who do similar work are not encouraged to mingle on projects at all, or even teams competing with one another for the same business (to improve their own team’s revenue report). Either you’re on a client service team that is overly praised so there’s no awareness of needing to improve communication skills, or you’re on another team that is stretched so thin there’s no time to communicate properly and even if you do the client service team freely ignores you anyway. Leadership doesn’t truly understand what staff do, the amount of work that gets put into executing projects, or how they’re perceived by staff. Thus, when something does go wrong management often listens to the client service complainers and their advice to everyone else involved boils down to figure out how to do their job better without offering any real suggestions or actual constructive feedback to improve their process. Rank and file employees are consistently not heard. Management has issued very rosy summaries of recent internal surveys about returning to the office and about our diversity and inclusion efforts, but based how other colleagues answered their surveys the summaries didn’t align with our experiences