First, let me say that AGAM likes to hire people straight out of college. This is probably because they know that no one else familiar with workplace norms would put up with the shockingly unprofessional, infantilizing culture.
On my first day, I was told that “we’re a family here.” I learned the hard way that this was code for: “there is a lot of drama and you will be sucked right into it.” Our “HR department” was a joke, so good luck getting anywhere with complaints.
The new CEO is all about money, where it used to be about finding creative solutions for client’s problems. This led to project coordinators turning into salespeople, which is basically what the job is now. It’s not at all what I signed up for at the time. We were given sales quotas and, at the time I left, no one on the team had ever successfully managed to meet one of them. We were constantly made to feel as if the company was in danger of going under if we didn’t make $X per month.
People were fired without notice. Turnover was high, morale was low. During the month of Christmas, of all times, we were told we had to work an additional hour each day with no additional form of compensation. Merry Christmas, right? On my birthday, I was told it was mandatory for ME to bring in desserts for everyone else. Don’t birthdays typically work the other way around?
The most horrifying thing is that, as a project coordinator, every email you receive is automatically CC’d to your supervisor. Yes, you read that right: every incoming email. My supervisor himself was great, but this practice showed that AGAM management as a whole does not trust their employees to perform their jobs without micromanagement. Good managers trust that their employees are adults who have been sufficiently trained to do their job correctly.
I will end by saying that I did the math and I got six days of PTO a year when I started. Six. And that’s sick time and vacation time combined.
Run far away.
