Beware - Environmental Compliance Manager Mapistry Employee Review

1.0
11 Nov 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Trust me, they don't outweigh the cons.

Cons

In short, I would not recommend Mapistry as a place of employment. Nor would I recommend Mapistry as a potential investment. I will elaborate, but first I would like to point out that the most recent five star reviews for the company titled “Very Happy Here” and “Great startup, a lot of opportunity and flexibility” were written by the husband and wife company owners. Personally I think this is incredibly misleading and not valuable at all to the job seeker or investor. Take the advice to management “I don’t think I could do any better.” as a prime example of why that particular review was written by the COO. I would also like to describe what Mapistry’s business model is, since it may be hard to understand for the job seeker, and even more so for a potential investor. Mapistry terms themselves as a tech startup in the environmental compliance space, this is pretty inaccurate, as the best way to describe the company and the way it functions is as a standard environmental consultant who uses their own platform which they created to more efficiently service clients. In this respect, the company is no unicorn, there are plenty of consulting firms which have done this. Mapistry’s platform is user friendly and intuitive. However, this is by no means saying the company is effective. The direction of the company is to spend like a tech startup to build software that’s marginally better than existing solutions. This is a company spending money it doesn’t have to further build a platform which relies on the standard consulting method. Who loses here is the Mapistry services team staff. Which must function by constantly providing billable add on services to clients in order to make any money for the company, and attempt to pay for all the other members of the company through the services work and a small bit from software sales. After describing how the company functions, I think it’s appropriate to describe working conditions at Mapistry. The entire staff is stressed beyond what I’ve seen at any other company, the staff has been downsized multiple times (forget about job security, the company fires fast, and often without solid reasoning, sometimes more influenced by who the owners of the company like rather than performance.) If you offer even constructive criticism to the COO, you’re met with hostile remarks to put whatever criticism you offer back onto yourself instead of attempting to remedy the situation. The owners as I stated earlier are husband and wife, CEO and COO. If I have learned anything from my experience at Mapistry it is to avoid a small company run by a husband and wife, it’s them against everyone if any problems arise. Neither of the two take criticism well at all. Especially the husband COO. I found that the people at Mapistry are what made the company and work tolerable. However, with frequent turnover (firings and quitting) there’s not much to encourage anyone to stick around. I also found very little motivation or “buy in”, not even a willingness by the CEO to offer motivation. The CEO and COO make poor decisions including pay cuts and benefit reductions in order to attempt and manipulate the companies expenses. Hard work is not rewarded at Mapistry. It is expected. Then met with pay and benefit cuts. Take everything with a grain of salt, such as the “unlimited PTO” which is great for flexibility of work, however, has an unstated expectation that you work harder and longer before taking PTO, but also after you get back from it in order to catch up on your work. Unfortunately, extended hours are already expected in day-to-day operations, so if you need to take time off, you will likely end up working the same amount of time (or during your PTO as was often the case when facing deadlines). The CEO and COO have also been caught openly lying to new hire candidates about financial stability of the company and work life balance. Both of which are pretty terrible. I was lied to when I was hired, as were at least 3 others that I knew of. In a company of roughly 20. I have attempted to be as unbiased as possible in this review, and my only hope by writing this is to prevent others from falling into the trap of Mapistry.

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Mapistry Response
6y
I appreciate you giving us feedback, and I am happy that you found most of your teammates great to work with. I have always felt that the team is the most important part of making a job enjoyable. I hear your frustration that losing teammates can be difficult when you have formed friendships with them, I have felt the same disappointment when losing teammates at Mapistry and at previous jobs. I am sorry that you did not leave your time with Mapisty as a fan of our business model. Mapistry does offer environmental services in addition to our software subscription. We have found that for some of our customers, this is important in order to help them solve problems identified by Mapistry’s software. Those customers that take advantage of these services have always had such glowing things to say about of services team and I am so proud of what this team brings to our company. We would not be where we are today without them. As we have grown we have made some mistakes in experimenting with how these services should augment our technology. There have been some cases of customers that were really looking for traditional environmental services, not a technology solution. Trying to turn these customers into users of Mapistry software has often worked, but not always, and I can see how this would be frustrating to our services team. We are constantly learning how to avoid these situations, this is the nature of any startup to experiment, fail and try again. For those reading this review, I would like to address a few factual inaccuracies in this review. Obviously, the author of this review was not completely happy at Mapistry. While it is probably impossible to make everyone happy, we are always working to make Mapistry an enjoyable place to work. To that end, I strongly encourage everyone on the team to come to me with their concerns so that they can be addressed and I am disappointed that many of these concerns were not brought to me during this employee’s tenure at Mapistry. Firstly, writing multiple reviews is clearly against Glassdoor’s policy and certainly not something we would engage in. (If anyone suspects that this is not the case they can flag reviews here and I believe Glassdoor would investigate.) In fact, as CEO, I have not written a review of Mapistry on Glassdoor, I only respond to reviews. Second, I would like to address some of the comments about salaries and benefits. Mapistry has never cut anyone’s base salary. It is true that we have experimented with different ways of offering commission or bonuses, but in making changes to these policies we have always taken into account how these changes would impact employees’ net pay. In addition, Mapistry has let people go due to performance, but only downsized once in 2015 (something I have never kept secret https://www.businessinsider.com/mapistry-ceo-allie-janoch-interview-2018-5). Mapistry has very generous benefits when compared to other startups of our size. For example, we have offered a health and dental plan paid for 100% by Mapistry since day 1. We offer unlimited PTO, a paid maternity/paternity plan, disability insurance and a 401(k). In 2018 we added the 401(k) to the set of benefits we offer and we decided to offer a 2% match. We recently decided to no longer do this match and I understand this might be frustrating. I hope to reinstate the match in the future. Mapistry does offer unlimited PTO and I am proud of the fact that we strongly encourage employees to take advantage of this. A typical Mapistry employee takes 3 weeks of PTO per year (some more, some less). It is true that employees likely feel the need to finish up work before leaving for vacation or catch up after returning, but I think this is probably typical of most work environments. Finally, I am sorry you felt you like were lied to in your interview. There isn’t enough context here for me to directly comment on the specifics, so I will just say no one at Mapistry has ever lied to a prospective employee. My guess is that this is an issue of difference of opinion. For example, what is a good work/life balance? Of course, everyone has a different opinion. What is financial stability? Again, this is subjective. Mapistry is transparent with employees about our financials, including monthly email updates including revenue and cash balances and all-hands meetings where we discuss financials. Fiscal transparency is usually a positive policy but can sometimes be unsettling to employees who haven’t worked for a venture-backed startup before. I wish you the very best in whatever you are up to now. I hope it brings you happiness. -Allie, CEO

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CEO approval
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1.0
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CEO approval
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Pros

You will learn only one lesson here: how your ego can destroy the workplace ambience and how you can avoid it.

Cons

The ego of the founders was too fragile. These evil people fought amongst each other and made things awfully uncomfortable for the staff. Employees witnessed their aggressive and poor behavior almost every day. Some even feared talking to these horrible people. It ruined the workplace ambience and made day-to-day life ridiculously stressful.

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Mapistry Response
6mo
Thank you for taking the time to share this. As one of the founders, it’s tough to read that someone had an experience that felt this negative, and I’m genuinely sorry if our actions contributed to that. We’ve grown a lot both as individuals and as a company since the early days, and part of that growth has come from hearing feedback like yours, even when it’s painful. Startups can be intense, and as founders we can make mistakes and can let stress show up in ways that impact others. That’s something I take seriously. Over the years we’ve worked hard to build healthier communication habits and a workplace where people feel respected and supported. I appreciate you taking the time to share your perspective, and if you are open to sharing more details confidentially, we welcome additional feedback so we can continue to learn and grow. We wish you the best moving forward and hope your current role brings you the environment and stability you were looking for.
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