Bad Leadership, Bad Business - Anonymous employee ASUG Employee Review

The business is confusing and constantly changing. A patchwork of revenue sources conflict with each other, leading to competing departments. The resulting workload was unsustainable—for employees and every customer/client served. Goals were impossible to meet due to oversaturation, but there was no sign of letting up. Managers do their best while juggling far too many responsibilities and expectations, while leadership appears to do none of the grunt work. When employees do speak up and suggest solutions (and they have been), leadership doesn’t listen (or fires them). Changes might come about with a DEI council and reorganization, but after experiencing a couple of restructurings and layoffs, it becomes apparent that what leadership promises is simply lip service. Restructurings don’t seem to actually change dynamics, and employees quickly learn how toxic ASUG can often be. Turnover was baffling, even pre-pandemic, with a slew of workers leaving every year. This was unsettling to employees, but leadership attempted to spin turnover as a positive. However, this left employees feeling expendable and not encouraged to stay at the organization, to the detriment of institutional knowledge, ability to serve the customer, and, ultimately, the business. The emails of employee departures or layoffs become at least a weekly occurrence, which is odd in such a small organization. One huge red flag for me was when managers told employees not to discuss amongst themselves an annual raise. This is not healthy and should never have happened. I hope having an individual in HR will help with fixing unethical workplace practices, as well as setting up transparent salary info and pay equity. But seeing as how leadership hired the person, I wouldn’t hold my breath.