Pros
- Some Level Of Flexibility - Decent Pay - Sometimes Troopers feel cared about in a similar way to "HQ" Employees (totally an us vs them attitude here) - The product is great - Great to interact with other moms that work here. Good for the social side - Zero Accountability - this actually could be a pro for some of the Chatbooks team members, but not the troopers. When the company doesn't perform, troopers are the first team members to go, even if they aren't the ones making the mistakes. It's a pro for especially the "HQ" team members. For example the marketing team hasn't hit their goals for years. Have any of them been fired? Nope. But troopers have! See more full details in "cons"
Cons
I hope i have enough room to list here: -- After thinking a few days after airing my grievances, I wanted to revisit this review now that I've calmed my nerves a bit. Making some updates based on my more relaxed thoughts and feelings now -- - Zero Accountability - Troopers (or any team members) aren't held accountable. Kinda nice to not be able to have to do much and still get paid, BUT! It's hard when so many people on the Trooper team are seriously under performing in all metrics. Can the leaders, or managers fire them? Probably, but they don't. They always give these girls excuses for why they are struggling. I haven't ever heard of a PIP actually being implemented and followed through on. - Poor Leadership - If you're reading this review it's important to know that their are different leadership levels at Chatbooks: Leaders - Really great people. Some are inexperienced, but they care, and I think do the best with what they are given Managers - Strong. Know what they are doing, and actively build the team and culture to their best ability. They probably carry most of the weight of the organization on their shoulders. The leaders support them, but they don't seem to get support from the directors, or executives. Directors - Disengaged, Vindictive, Unaccountable, Disingenuous, Rude, Does put effort into things (but only if it's very public facing), Disconnected, Unwilling to take feedback or make changes to improve. From our level, it honestly would be nice to know what this level of team member does. Myself and colleagues feel that this level of team member gets the benefit of being lazy, but, to be fair we probably only see a little of what they do. Being transparent and maybe sharing what they are working on might give us more confidence in them, especially if we see them actively working to change many of the other things. Executives - Some have good ideas, but lack direction. Doesn't seem to be much accountability here either Founders - They do truly seem to care. Good listeners. Definitely don't seem to be very strong leaders at all, but they have built a company that has some good values, stands up for things that they care about, and the teams definitely appreciates this. 0 accountability is because of poor leadership (stems from the most senior levels, mainly the directors), and disengaged leadership (also directors). Take the most senior trooper leadership team members (directors). They have no clue what troopers even do. It's relatively known by the entire team (even direct reports) that's trooper leadership is very unprofessional, never takes critiques or feedback, and is quick to find blame with others vs. actually trying to be better. Some of the trooper directors actively spreads lies throughout the team to meet their own agenda. We as a team though know the lies, but we're too scared to confront some of the leadership because they get so passive aggressive and for whatever reason C Suite leadership gives the trooper leaders free reign. More senior leadership is also poor. They spend Millions of Dollars developing "the next best thing" and don't take our (the troopers) feedback! I'm not exaggerating when I say that EVERY SINGLE TROOPER could've told leadership that "Roxy" was a bad idea. No one would use it, it didn't work, and was a waste of money. This happens time and time again. After all, Troopers are Chatbooks target marketing, but because troopers are "2nd class employees" they don't get any respect. See below bullet - Troopers as 2nd Class Employees - So often during all hands calls things will be announced, and it always needs to be clarified that these benefits, or advantages are ONLY for HQ employees. Troopers ARE NOT taken care of in the same ways. As an example, during the holidays which are the busiest time (and Chatbooks back office teams always make dumb mistakes - ie launching a coupon code that hasn't been created, sending a promo without letting anyone else in the company know it's coming, etc) the "HQ Team" gets like 2 weeks of vacation. When the troopers contact them to try and resolve the issues that the HQ Team created by their dumb decisions, they are upset for the Troopers contacting them!? Well that's some BS, since they created the issue in the first place There are times when Holiday Pay is announced on the schedule, and then changed after troopers have signed up for those times. The management team tries to hide that this actually happened. Luckily our team sometimes takes screenshots of things because we don't trust leadership (mostly directors and above, but don't think the lower level leaders are empowered to actually make decisions, or take action). Even interns at "HQ" get tons of the benefits that aren't even on the table for troopers - Marketing is terrible to work with - The marketing team here actually does some good work. They are terrible at planning it. They release a marketing calendar 12 months in advance and invariably change it days before lots of Troopers decided to took time off (because of the marketing team saying this would be a slow time) They never let the Trooper team know when they are making changes to things, launching new promos, etc. We have an internal slack channel where we were going to get these updates, and where we could also share feedback with the marketing team. Recently Troopers have been banned from posting feedback in this group. Why? Because the Marketing team might get their feelings hurt by our feedback (which is losing the company money). They can't take basic criticism, which if it was taken would improve things! (goes back to poor leadership, and lack of accountability).