Poor Work Culture, No Growth Opportunities, and Unethical Management - Digital Content Specialist Capital Region BOCES Employee Review

-Poor pay. Management brags about the incredible abilities and capabilities of their designers and DCSs, but do not pay standard industry rates. -No growth opportunities. Yearly increases in wages do not keep up with standard inflation let alone what the economy is experiencing in 2023. There are no upward opportunities in the organization without a 10–20-year commitment to the organization. -A culture of crunch due to clients, managers, and peers being chronically late to deadlines and deliverables. -A culture that punishes employees for completing projects ahead of time or in less hours than they wish to bill the districts for. “Your reward for completing a job early is another job of equal length or more.” Management suggested gamifying their project management system to fill up encumbered hours to prevent other managers from assigning other projects. -Very little gets done in the workplace due to an older workplace culture of talking with everyone in the workplace for hours instead of completing their work. -No accountability from management. Management practices double speak with their employees. High level management is completely disconnected from the day-to-day work of workers. Management celebrates keeping the status quo. -Unprofessional workplace where management will swear in front of you, ask extremely personal questions about your life, and talk poorly about their peers behind their back. Management reacts poorly to any feedback and does not take responsibility for mistakes made. -Slow timetables that management typically expects 5–10-year time horizons to realize. Around $90,000 of equipment, paid for by NYS Taxpayers, sat unused for 8 months with no actionable plan in sight. -All equipment is poorly organized with no cohesive system for proper inventory. -Unethical practices among management where they try to coerce a school district into paying for services that the Communications Department had vaguely defined. School districts are forced to provide resources and space for DCS to work in their district. Management insisted on DCS to work on other client work while on sight for a given district. -Extremely high turnover. Often, I would find out someone left the company mid project when my messages could not find an address to deliver to. There would be no plan in place for how the project would be completed with the lack of key stakeholders. Employees are expected to pick up the slack. Even the highest levels of the organization do not last more than 4-5 years. -Capital Region BOCES is grossly understaffed. Management struggles to balance the projects they keep accepting with their fading workforce. Common phrases include “This is normal” or “This isn’t typically something we would ask of you” but this is the normal for the organization. Management is disconnected or refuses to acknowledge the reality of their staffing capabilities. -Most, if not all, work done by DCSs is meaningless. It only serves to check boxes so people can get paid. -A toothless Union that complains about losing employees to NYS at an alarming rate while offering no solutions.