Pros
I was with Banyan for over 2 ½ years. It was an experience, and while I don’t feel as though it was very positive, I would like to voice what I feel like are both the high and low points for anyone considering working there. The best thing about Banyan by far is the people that you will meet. I made close friends there that I will be close to the rest of my life. At least at a basic level, I feel like the people here know how to be polite, how to socialize, and how to make others feel welcome. If you talk to everyone that works there at least once, you are bound to meet someone that you will get along with very well. I think that Banyan has an intuitive and cheerful atmosphere. The majority of people that work there genuinely care about their jobs, and they want to contribute to the betterment of the company. I think this drive is the focal point as to why I had stayed at this company for such a long time. Even when there were major issues in the past, you could always dig deep and find a group of phenomenal people that accomplish incredible things. It gave me a lot of pride to work along with those individuals, and I think that ties a lot into my next point. Banyan is a huge learning environment. Whether you are learning from your coworkers, managers, or even other’s mistakes or successes, this is the place to do it. The company has had such an enormous rate of both growth and failure that you can easily learn a lesson if you just pay attention to the situation. There is still potential with Banyan. I don’t think I could’ve said the same thing even 6 months ago, but the changes to management have definitely improved the situation. It's not fantastic, but it's headed in the right direction. Finally I believe that if you put everything you have into an idea or an issue, you will be taken seriously and have your work be considered carefully. Unfortunately, a lot of people have seen others’ ideas accomplished, and trick themselves into some poor sense of entitlement to have their half-baked ideas become the “next big thing” for their department or the company. If you are looking for an organization where you can pitch your best ideas and have your voice heard, and you are willing to do a lot of work in order to back your idea up, then you will enjoy working here.
Cons
It’s hard for me to categorize the causes of the problems that Banyan has had, but I’m going to try my best. I think that a lot of blame gets placed on the wrong people or events because everyone wants to point fingers and have a scapegoat. I think that the first biggest mistake that the company made was the “culture”. Everyone that works in the Utah County area has seen companies like Qualtrics, Domo, etc. that have that Google-esque vibe where employees are provided gym memberships, bring dogs to work, hammock in the break room, play xbox and ping pong all day, and basically have an environment that appeals to the stereotypical millennial worker. For some reason, those who were hiring and building the employee base at Banyan made this “culture” the most important trait that they looked for when hiring employees. So instead of hiring based off of merit, or work ethic, or referrals, or dedication, or actual value potential to the company, the leaders hired people who exuded this awful culture. All this did was breed entitlement, laziness, and jealousy. I actually watched multiple managers throw away resumes in the middle of an interview. The hiring process became reliant on 3 things: who you knew, how two-faced you could act, and if the person hiring you thought you were a “culture fit”. I also firmly believe that about 5-10% of the people that work here are generating 90% of the problems and negativity. A ton of people have left reviews talking about the terrible workers, or specific teams that are simply lazy or don't do their job, and I think that's not even slightly close to the right focus. The lazy workers those reviews are referring to usually end up weeding themselves out and either quit or get called out for not producing anything. The people I’m talking about are the 4 or 5 people that have gone far beyond entry level positions, or even start out high up in leadership that not only produce next to nothing, but they are very intelligent and do whatever they can to manipulate everyone else in the company, convincing others that they are extremely productive. They take credit for other's’ work. They bash other people’s ideas and then they reward themselves for “challenging others”. They pitch ideas that don’t actually make any sense in essence, but they use buzzwords and other gibberish in an attempt to flex their egos and appear smart. They have this inane sense of self-worth and validation. It’s actually admirable how manipulative they are, because most of them even seem convinced themselves that they are extremely valuable employees. As you can guess, these same problem employees tend to destroy everything they touch. What I don’t understand is that instead of simply firing them and solving the problem, these employees are moved from department to department where they ruin just about everything in their path. I’ve seen some of these employees fail at a position, then be moved to another position where they get ratted out by their coworkers in that position, so they’re moved to yet another position that produces no value, so they’re moved to another position again where they tank all of that departments value and cost more people their jobs. Even funnier is that the majority of Banyan employees who have worked for or with these people know exactly who I’m describing, yet for some reason the general knowledge that this person causes nothing but issues is still not enough to have them receive any sort of punishment or even an honest investigation. One of my largest personal headaches has been the lack of emotional intelligence of some who hold/held leadership positions. It has caused so many rash decisions to be made based off of pride and arrogance. There have been so many leaders in the past here who can’t handle even the smallest amount of criticism, and as a result, there have been countless times where employees haven’t been able to express how they feel and gossiping and drama starts corroding away teams. Similar to the last problem, most of those who suffer from being emotionally inept tend to think that they are experts on emotions and this causes their ineptitude to be magnified. Another sore subject for many is the lack of recognition and compensation. If you’re getting hired here, you need to know what your worth is and establish it with whoever is above you before it’s too late. There are so many people who are paid a fraction of what they’re worth, or who produce most of the results in the company yet don’t receive any recognition for what they’ve done. On the other side of that, there are plenty of people who have been spoiled rotten with little to no contribution. Last, there is an extremely high occurrence where someone takes a good concept or idea, and ruins it. I mean, they completely blow it out of proportion, and worship it to the point that it destroys everything that we had previously viewed as our company's goals or direction. To be fair, this hasn’t happened nearly as much in the past 3 months as it did in the first years of the company, but it has become something of a joke for anyone who has worked here for a long time. Someone reads a book, or hears a good idea from another local business owner, and instead of simply adapting the idea and trying to make it conform to the company model, it gets written on every object and surface in the office. During these “trending idea” phases if you try to get any work done, it will be drastically hindered. You could be talking about something as basic as where to eat lunch when all of a sudden one of those “challenging, emotionally intelligent” leaders will interject with “But how would DOMO order lunch?? Does a multiplier use sticky notes or a notebook??”. It’s almost comical how poorly some of these ideas are implemented.