EPS Group is a good place to work if you can get in with the right people. If you do not though it is cutthroat and stressful. Depending on where you work you are given a job to do but with minimal direction. Asking for direction will bring you a "wing it" response and when you do the work with no direction your often picked apart for not following direction.
You will find that the culture is fun and employee oriented if your in the office. Bonuses every 3 months. Amount is dependent on how much your boss likes you. Ping Pong table in main lunch room for a little stress relief. Donuts on Wednesday and Thursdays depending on if your field or office. Benefits are great for medical, vision, dental, PTO is combination of 16 days for both sick time and vacation time.
If you are in the field the culture is very absent. The survey department culture is not very good. They view the entry level employees as just helpers and expendable.
Another thing culture wise is they bid the jobs super low. Which is good for the buyer but what it does is it puts the employee at a disadvantage because you are already losing money the moment you set your foot on the job. The profit margin is so thin that one unexpected problem can blow the budget and you the employee (not the ones who bid the job low) are at fault.
Depending on which department you are in management can be on both sides of the spectrum. One department management can be very supportive (i.e. Land Scape architecture) where as Survey department (both Legal and Construction) can be very caustic with some managers verbally yelling at employees to others being very respectful to you then very slanderous while your away. Upper management will always side with the project managers even if they PM's are in the wrong. No real way to really resolve issues between employees because it goes back to the PM's as to who they like more.
The hard parts of the job was no direction given in your duties, no real feed back in order to improve yourself as an employee, no real training provided to the employee, the backbiting of entrenched employees, not knowing if your doing good or bad in your job etc. The yearly reviews were just a letter at your deck in January. Being given jobs that were almost impossible to complete due to so much missing information. No face to face yearly review. The nepotism was the hardest because you couldn't get a fair shake and the daily feeling was the uneasiness of whether you were going to be eventually let go or such due to the extreme lack of employer to employee communication coupled with the interactions of entrenched employees. If you get let go it will always be a couple days before end of the month so that they don't have to cover you for the next month which is ok by the law but it makes it where you instantly lose any benefits you have almost immediately. You will not be offered cobra after you leave due to it will never come in the mail. Which I might ad is a violation of the law but its technically unenforceable.
The most enjoyable part of the job was the employee benefits and the donuts on Wednesdays. The medical was very good.
What I learned is that working there you have to be very guarded in your interactions with management and the entrenched employees due to the very real possibility of being reprimanded over very trivial things that when you look at the situation as a whole nothing wrong had happened. Also to you as an employee are responsible for your own training.
