Chaos - and not the organized kind - Anonymous employee Compass Employee Review

This is the least collaborative place I’ve ever worked. The different teams don’t talk to each other or work together at all, and it’s very cliquey. The majority of the positive reviews are coming from agents, who aren’t employees but are actually considered customers. And for them, it’s a great place to be an agent, because they’re treated like royalty. Employees, on the other hand, are treated like red-headed stepchildren, especially the transaction and finance teams. While the company focuses on creating world-class tools for agents (aka customers) to utilize, the internal tooling for employees is horrible, clunky, outdated trash. Compass considers itself the Neiman Marcus of real estate, but structurally it’s unstable, cheaply made, and constantly undermines and contradicts itself. For agents maybe it’s Neiman Marcus - for employees it’s more like Dollar General. Management has no idea what they’re doing, and seeing the same process or policy change repeatedly is the norm. For a startup, lots of evolution is expected, but here, a single process or policy can change several times in one day as different managers bicker about it and throw tantrums to get their way. New policies are never actually announced to agents, because everyone knows they won’t stick anyway. This results in a lot of frustration from agents, who then take it out on employees. There are a lot of managers here who have no business being managers. Expectations are a gray area, and getting clarification is next to impossible -- which doesn’t matter anyway because the next day it will change. And because managers can’t stick with a policy for more than 24 hours, employees never know what they should or shouldn’t be doing. It’s a disorganized, chaotic mess. The CEO seems like a nice guy but is only focused on agent satisfaction and seems oblivious to the needs of employees. Every company-wide meeting was about supporting agents and never held any value for employees. When you interview at Compass, you’re told that managers don’t tolerate the agents treating employees badly, but that’s a lie. Expect to be talked down to and experience a lot of rudeness - by agents AND managers. They also bait you with the promise of bonuses, but I’ve heard from several other high-performing employees that actually getting a bonus is next to impossible. But if you think you can take your concerns up the ladder, think again. My team was basically forbidden from talking to anyone above our direct manager, with strong implications of retaliation and ridicule as consequences.