-job security is low, more so if you are part of an acquisition, you WILL be on a very short leash-
during my 3 month period, 7 people from my branch were fired, 1 more within the next two months
-management does not know how to appreciate employees and doesn't seem to understand the difference between average and high quality employees-
I was once told when suggesting an incentive or contest program "I will not reward employees for doing their jobs", this sums up the entire management attitude at Aldridge (in my opinion)
-during this 5 month period, 9 people from the Dallas branch left the company-
-At the moment of writing this review, only 7 of the original 25 employees remain(28% ±5%)-
-no appreciation for hard work-
I once stepped up and worked two consecutive 20 hour overnight shifts in an emergency situation, coordinated 24 hour shifts with another employee who volunteered his free time, we were able to get the company functional as fast as possible with EXTREME dedication, and was never told thank you by any management staff.
I also averaged about 55-60 hrs per week during my time at Aldridge and was never thanked for going above an beyond.
-time entering time-
Aldridge requires that 8hrs of ticket time is documented each day by techs. On average, I spent over an hour each day making sure all of my time was accurately accounted for. Unfortunately, getting 8 hrs documented means I had to work 9-10 hrs per day. The problem with this process is techs need to keep a running total of minutes/hours spent on each ticket in real time. This becomes extremely difficult if you are working multiple tickets at once or waiting for a callback. It creates an environment where techs will embellish time, which negates the entire purpose. Another problem with this is there is no break-time allowed. This is not said out loud, but also not possible to get two 15 minute breaks and document 8 hours without working over 8.5+ hours in a day.
-top heavy executive management staff comprised of family members, college friends, and in-laws-
If you look at the "Our Management Team" page on the website, 6 out of the 10 are/were married to each other. That's 60% of senior management. If you have aspirations of becoming executive management, this is a very difficult place to do so without first buying a ring.
-the only thing constant is change-
During my 3 months, I had 3 different bosses. Other departments had similar management changes.
-no leadership- (this one is all opinion, but coming from a successful manager with almost 5 years mgmt experience)
Management seems to really not know what they're doing. They do not know how to correct behavior with discipline or even direct communication. I believe this is the true reason for the unusually high amount of terminations. I witnessed one employee get fired over an email argument with his boss of the week, an argument in which he was 100% right about what he was saying, but wrong about delivery. Even weak leadership would know to sit them both down and talk to them together. No need to pull the trigger on a termination. Management doesn't build relationships with employees and wouldn't know the first thing about their lives outside of work. To me, this is a huge red flag. Management doesn't recognize talent and thinks that techs are interchangeable and a closed ticket is a closed ticket. In reality, one tech might close a ticket because they tried something that worked. A talented tech will find a root cause and make sure this doesn't happen again at a global level or will spend time documenting what happened and making sure no other tech will take more than a few minutes working on the same ticket before resolving the issue moving forward. The culture at Aldridge rewards the lazy tech in the first example.
-no collaboration makes it hard to grow-
Teams are compartmentalized. The system is set up to where tickets get "escalated" if the first tech cannot resolve the issue. Techs are not allowed to ask for help and learn from someone in an upper tier. This means a tech that didn't know how to fix a ticket one day will also not be able to fix it the next. Only the escalation guy will know what was done and the team is no better than the day before.
-acquiring clients, not employees-
It is my opinion that Aldridge buys companies for their clients and not the business itself. In our case, they picked up about 75 clients, lost or fired most of our company's employees, did not rehire any lost/fired positions, and retained a large percentage of our clients. I have no doubt that's good business, but there are a lot of folks that were happy with their jobs before and that was taken away. I don't know how anyone could be proud doing that kind of business.
